How Inconvenient Security Protocols Can Sink Your Company

Security is important for much more than just the Internet. It’s an integral part of organized society, to the point where there are several layers of security for public transportation, airports, and so much more. The only problem is that properly taking advantage of security is only as effective as how well your employees adhere to corporate policy.

Employees will often neglect security measures because they find them to be inconvenient or time-consuming. This happens every day with solutions that are designed to help keep data secure. For example, a Bring Your Own Device policy is designed to help your business keep secure information from hackers, but if your employees don’t want to go through the process of implementing BYOD on their devices, they could unnecessarily be putting your data at risk.

In the end, it comes down to freedom vs security. Employees want to use their mobile devices and have a sense of freedom for how they work, but you can’t allow this to happen without some sort of security oversight. Otherwise, you could be putting your entire business infrastructure at risk of infiltration from outside entities. Ensuring that your business follows proper security best practices is crucial to the continued functionality of your organization.

This is especially true in light of employees who don’t follow security best practices. As is the case with many online threats, employees will continue to be the weakest link in your business’s defenses if you don’t take action to remedy this. You can make patching up this vulnerability easier by reinforcing security best practices, including:

• Regularly changing passwords: While changing your passwords is important, it can be difficult to remember passwords for all of your different accounts. This is why many organizations implement enterprise-level password managers that can securely store your passwords and call them when they’re needed. Passwords should always be complex strings of lower and upper-case letters, numbers, and symbols.
• Spotting phishing scams: Employees should be trained on how to identify phishing scams. This includes educating them on how hackers will use phishing scams to coerce information out of them. Macro Systems can help your employees understand how best to avoid, and detect, phishing scams.
• Using two-factor authentication: Any accounts that have access to critical information should be equipped with secondary security features, like two-factor authentication. This makes it more difficult for hackers to access accounts remotely. Two-factor authentication often means that hackers will need physical access to your device, which makes it extraordinarily difficult to hack into an account.

If you’re concerned that your team needs additional security measures put into place to enforce best practices, you can implement what’s called a Unified Threat Management (UTM) solution. A UTM consists of firewall, antivirus, spam blocking, and content filtering solutions, which are all designed to limit your business’s exposure to threats.

For more information about cyber security and other data security best practices, give Macro Systems a call at (703) 359-9211.