October is recognized as Cybersecurity Awareness Month by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). The theme for this year is “See Yourself in Cyber”, which emphasises that even though cybersecurity is a complex subject, it is ultimately about people.

There are several well-established strategies that you can take to protect your data. This Cybersecurity Awareness Month, let's look at some fundamental best practices for businesses to improve their data security.

1.     Use Strong Passwords and Multi-Factor Authentication

Setting strong passwords that are unique for every account is the first essential step toward protecting your data security. A strong password is at least 12 characters long and contains passphrases. Since you need a different password for every account, you can use a password manager to store all your passwords in an encrypted database.

2.     Implement Least Privilege Access

Your organization can implement access controls to allow access to sensitive information to certain authorized users only. With the least privilege access, you can limit access to the lowest level necessary that is needed to perform the specific job function. In this manner, if an account is compromised, the hackers would be prevented from accessing sensitive information. Other steps can include ensuring that employees who have left the organization do not have access to your systems and physically monitoring your premises and facilities.

3.   Conduct Regular Cybersecurity training

Cybersecurity Awareness programs are crucial in the data security risk mitigation strategy. As cyber criminals are always looking for newer ways to attack your systems, it is important to continuously educate yourself and your employees to remain aware of cyber threats. Conducting periodic data security programs and creating a culture of good cyber hygiene can help lower the overall cybersecurity risk.

4.  Keep Your Software Updated

Enabling automatic software updates is one of the easiest ways to combat cybersecurity risks. Software vendors upgrade their products and release security patches to address vulnerabilities in their systems. Ensuring that you update your software regularly can automatically protect your account as cyber criminals are looking for machines running older and vulnerable versions.

These are some tried-and-tested methods you can take to safeguard your business’s data security and educate your employees on cybersecurity threats and best practices. Wherever you are in your data security journey, GajShield can guide you to make sure that your systems are protected against cyber threats. Contact us to learn more about our data security solutions.