7 Ways To Keep Your Business Information Secure

Businesses transmit sensitive information every day, such as credit card numbers, names, addresses, and bank account numbers.

Consumers trust companies to protect their data and keep it secure. Information security continues to evolve in the business world.

As hackers continuously invent new ways to infiltrate security systems, companies need to understand the best ways to keep business information secure in the 21^st century.

The security methods of the past are no longer relevant. Below are the top seven ways that companies can keep their business data secure.

Table of Contents

1) Get the Necessary Certifications

Your main goal should be for your company to achieve the International Information Security Standard.

ISO/IEC 27001 is an essential international standard that establishes the specification for a company’s information security management system.

If you want your company to earn this certification, you must follow all its requirements. It is the only way to ensure that all employee details, consumer information, financial information, and intellectual property is protected.

The ISO/IEC 27001 requires you to examine all security risks to your business information and implement security controls to address them.

Aside from that, an information security management system must be adopted to manage the ongoing security threats facing your business.

2) Establish Strict Password Policies

Set strict password policies for your employees. For example, you must require your employees to change their passwords periodically, such as 60 or 90 days.

The passwords cannot be easy to guess. Require the passwords to be complicated (e.g., one uppercase letter, one lowercase letter, one number, and eight or more characters).

Another great password policy is to require a different password for each system account and online account.

Do not let your employees use the same password for all their accounts. If someone were to discover an employee’s password, they would essentially have access to all their other accounts if the same password gets set.

3) Background Checks

No amount of cybersecurity will matter if you have shady employees. That is why background checks are essential to conducting whenever you hire new employees.

If they have any criminal record related to theft or fraud, then you should not hire them. Let your most trustworthy employees manage sensitive information.

These could be senior-level employees with years of experience in your company. Doing this adds an extra level of certainty that all the business information is not compromised.

4)Dedicated Computer for Sensitive Information

Do not use the same computer for all your business activities. For instance, use a dedicated computer for processing financial transactions and managing all private information.

Use a different computer for all other activities, such as managing your company’s social media profiles.

The advantage here is you reduce the risk of hacking. Social media and other third-party websites could create a portal for hackers to infiltrate your computer. That is why you should process sensitive information on a different computer.

5) Apply Security Updates

Computer security software has new updates available all the time. Antivirus and Internet security companies are constantly monitoring the internet for new security threats and attacks.

They look for vulnerabilities in existing security systems and develop patches to fix them. You must download and apply the latest security patches as they become available. It will ensure your computer systems are protected from the latest threats out there.

6) Encryption

Encryption makes it nearly impossible for hackers to understand sensitive business information without a unique decryption key.

If you encrypt all the information on your computer’s hard drive, it will prevent hackers from understanding it.

At the very least, apply file-level encryption to all sensitive documents on your computer. There are encryption tools available on the internet that can do this for you. Make sure you choose a reputable encryption tool with excellent customer feedback.