After months or years of running a business, there inevitably comes a time when it becomes an interesting target for hackers, criminals, and competitors. Companies that realize that they have been attacked can do little other than pick up the pieces and prepare for the next incident. On the other hand, a business that is proactive in protecting its data, assets, and employees can respond quickly to incidents and eliminate or substantially reduce the amount of damage caused.
Attackers may target various aspects of your operations, from access to the facility to an account in your email service. Accordingly, this article will provide a diverse range of recommendations for common scenarios.
1. Use an encrypted email service
The range of sensitive information found in emails can make them highly damaging in the hands of a criminal. By using a private email service (preferably one that utilizes end-to-end encryption), you can ensure that your emails are kept secure, even in the event of email server compromise.
2. Next-generation firewall
This type of solution is like a large toolkit with all the gadgets you could dream of. A next-generation firewall (NGFW) does all the same things that a traditional firewall does, but with the potential additions of deep packet inspection, intrusion prevention, anti malware capabilities, and user management. This type of software solution may be expensive to set up for an enterprise, but its versatility can help set up near-unshakeable defenses.
3. Redundancy tools
Restoring data and preventing its loss are crucial tasks for any business, as even a small event that negatively impacts clients' data can stain the company reputation for years.
Backups are the most obvious solution, with several implementations possible. Some companies keep their backups locally, and others prefer a warm or hot site, or even the public cloud. Saving data on hard drive or SSD is the traditional approach, but tape backups are another affordable and effective path that might be considered.
Other popular solutions that foster restoration or preservation of data are RAID arrays (except RAID 0) and DLP (data loss prevention) - solutions that stop leaks, breaches, and destruction is sensitive data.
4. Other network instruments
A comprehensive firewall is a good start for securing company data and the network as a whole, but you may need other tools as well. To bring up one example, many businesses implement a NACL (network access control list) to limit access to the network only to authorized devices, and a proxy server that filters traffic and blocks access to certain content.
Another factor that impacts the flow of data in an organization is how the network is structured, so you can limit congestion and data collision by making use of subnets, VLANs, and other network virtualization tools.
5. Patch management
Many of the biggest data breaches of the past 5 years have been caused by a failure of administrators to update old and vulnerable software/firmware. Ideally, you will set up a patch management system that can update the OS and applications on devices remotely and in bulk, because doing this manually on each workstation becomes too time-consuming as the company roster grows to dozens or hundreds of employees.
6. Staff training & monitoring
Last but not least, it's best not to get too reliant on technological and automated solutions, and supplement then with proper employee training. This applies to both how to handle data and identifying/responding to various threats. Unfortunately, you also have to consider the possibility of disgruntled or malicious employees performing hostile actions, so limiting their permissions according to the principle of least privilege (users can only do what is definitively necessary in their roles), can limit the impact of such a negative event.
