In the world of hackers, security breaches, and data leaks, business security is paramount in ensuring a company’s proper and safe functioning. However, many companies don’t take online security seriously enough, leading to daily attacks and various threats.
These can devastate any company and its customers or users, as cybercriminals can quickly steal valuable, private, and financial data. Therefore, implementing the latest and most significant security measures is a must. Fortunately for us, these have been massively improving recently.
That’s why we’ve compiled a list of the five most vital business security tips companies should immediately implement. You can read more about them in detail below.
Proper network infrastructure
Responsible for connecting a company’s systems, devices, and users, a network infrastructure holds incredible value in ensuring the safe functioning of all company’s aspects. Thus, a proper infrastructure is one of the most vital elements in improving your business’s security.
Depending on your budget, you can invest in the latest Wi-Fi standards and routers or get proxies and VPNs for your users. These elements will ensure a safe connection between your company’s devices and users, increasing security and patching any possible holes a cybercriminal can exploit.
Similarly, not all users should have access to everything inside the company. Properly handling permissions can make a difference between a well-rounded company with decent security and one whose data just got leaked.
Secure docker containers
DevOps and DevSecOps have been the norm in the past few years, and various companies have moved toward using such teams. These teams often develop and optimize products using containerization, where Docker and Docker images are kings. Such platforms allow companies to develop strategies focusing on secure product development, adding a layer of security at each step.
However, these strategies aren’t enough anymore. Regardless of how valuable Docker images and containers might seem initially, they still have a few vulnerabilities that many companies don’t focus enough on, and these vulnerabilities can ruin your business.
To ensure safer Docker images, you must do regular or automatic container image scanning, which will let you patch the existing Docker vulnerabilities and increase your company’s security.
Passwords and employee education
We can’t overstate the importance of robust passwords, yet employees often fail miserably at this step. Even in 2023, people still use incredibly weak passwords, leaving an open door for even amateur hackers and cybercriminals to access valuable company info whenever they want.
Therefore, you must educate all your employees about the risks of poor passwords and awful security habits. Similarly, it would help if you didn’t have employees using personal apps on business devices, such as laptops or smartphones, as many such apps can pose a significant cybersecurity hazard.
Moreover, hiring white-hat pen testers can be an excellent way of testing your company’s security. These are essentially ethical hackers that companies can use to breach their walls and try security measures.
Proper authentication measures
Weak passwords seem like they’re not going anywhere anytime soon, regardless of how many security meetings and seminars you organize. Therefore, use other security methods to enhance your company’s security and remove the risk of lazy employees and lousy password habits.
These measures can also help prevent security breaches and company data from getting into the wrong hands, allowing companies to keep their users and remain trustworthy.
Therefore, businesses should implement multi-factor authentication methods, or MFA for short. These measures reduce and limit human errors in cybersecurity, which are responsible for about 90% of all security breaches.
MFA requires a few steps to log in, effectively shifting the focus from weak passwords and requiring much more to reach valuable or sensitive data, protecting your company’s inner workings from nefarious outside players.
Encrypting data
When the methods above aren’t enough, and your risk management or online security teams feel like cybercriminals can still reach your data, there’s another trick up your sleeve that can act as an additional layer of security—data encryption.
Encrypting your company data converts easily readable data into code that you can only read with proper encryption keys, which you should only give to employees you trust. Even if someone somehow passes all your security measures, they’ll still only gain access to data they can’t read or use.
Additionally, your company should use the latest and most powerful encryption methods, which do end-to-end encryption. These make it possible to secure the data on both the servers it’s on and during transmission from a user to the server and vice versa.
Conclusion
Cybercrime and data breaches are a constant threat to businesses worldwide. Companies are experiencing hacking attempts left and right, causing sensitive data to get into the wrong hands and destroying any trust users had for those companies up until then.
Fortunately, there are specific strategies all businesses should use to strengthen their security. These include the latest bells and whistles in network infrastructure, containerization and image scanning, strong passwords, multi-factor authentication, encryption, and employee education. They can significantly improve your data safety and increase trust in your business.
