Data Privacy and Cyber Security Essentials
Data breaches cost businesses millions of dollars every year. Besides the financial hit, confidential information can be stolen, leading to a loss of trust in these organizations. Is your company addressing the fundamentals of cybersecurity that properly safeguard sensitive information? Keep reading to learn more about cybersecurity and how to keep your data secure.
Know the Law
Your company is undoubtedly responsible for complying with applicable data protection regulations. Currently, it's a hodgepodge of international, federal, and state laws whose applicability is sometimes hard to untangle.
Some of the oldest data privacy laws secure individuals' right to access their own data, correct it, and get information about how data is used.
Newer privacy laws protect how organizations use certain types of information, particularly biometric data and personally identifiable information like names and addresses. Others protect particular categories of information like medical records or financial data.
The measures you need to take will depend on your industry, the type of information you collect or transmit, and where you do business.
Establish Threat Prevention Measures
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
In cybersecurity, threat prevention is a set of strategies that help your company proactively identify, ameliorate, and defend against cyber threats. These measures are intended to minimize the possibility of system compromise, unauthorized access, data breaches, and other types of security incidents.
In a modern workplace, this includes protecting employee devices in addition to securing official networks and equipment.
Know How to Handle an Incident
Your company should have incident response protocols that guide your actions during and after a breach or attack.
Effective incident response has six steps: preparing for an inevitable security breach, identifying when incidents occur, containing the extent of the damage, eradicating the threat, a recovery phase to validate systems as safe, and a debrief to consider the lessons learned.
Train All Personnel in Data Privacy and Cyber Security
While cybersecurity normally gets associated with IT, the truth is that a company can only keep their data secure with the cooperation of every one of their employees.
Supplying employees with a formal introduction to workplace information security is a great way to ensure it's fresh on everyone's minds. We offer an Information Security and Privacy Fundamentals course as an introduction to the basics, as well as a Compliance Spot program to address the need for information security on workplace computers. Unlike reading a blog article, these cybersecurity courses have knowledge checks to help learners with information application and recall so they can put what they learn to work.
Enroll your employees in one of our information security courses today!
