Find how to protect against key data security threats

Find how to protect against key data security threats

Recently, a study found that most hotels don’t adequately protect the data that collects. Increasingly, we are faced with news of this type, which is worrying given the increased security threats. In addition to the increase in these threats, companies still face the “heavy hand” of the GDPR: in Portugal, the new legislation has already made its first “victims” through penalties for offenders. In a digital age where we deal with information every day, we must know how to protect ourselves from the main threats to data security. We’ve prepared 5 key tips to make sure your information is not lost or exposed!

Don’t use public networks

We should not connect our devices to public networks such as airports and hotels. You should never enter important personal data when you are connected to a network of this type. If you are out of the office and need access to important information, you should always use a VPN connection. A virtual private network (VPN) is a type of private connection that uses a public network to access your company’s data. It contains a connection encryption that prevents data interception and IP tracing. This is the safest way to access company data over public networks and should be the only way the company can allow employees to access corporate e-mail outside the internal network.

Automatically block malicious content

There are some websites that are created exclusively to distribute malware, which steal your users’ information and are used by hackers to commit cyber crimes. To attract people, these sites publish appealing content and usually seek to attract people’s attention through engaging offers. To prevent this from occurring, it is advisable to install software that automatically blocks your company’s malicious website and network data. Another tip is to install download verification programs, to avoid installing viruses on the devices.

Sign rigid confidentiality terms

On many occasions, employees and IT service providers need to access confidential business data in order to be able to work. This inevitably poses a risk to businesses because their security may be compromised due to the access of several people to the information. In this way, it is advised that companies sign confidentiality agreements with these persons and entities in order to protect the data. This measure, in addition to increasing employees’ commitment to information security, also ensures legal protection for the company if the data is made public. It is advisable to impose sanctions in these documents in case of non-compliance.

Perform backups frequently

It is a basic tip that in theory everyone knows, but in practice few practice with formality. Having a corporate email backup policy is critical to recovering lost or stolen data by third parties. Without a backup policy that involves all employees, it is much more likely that there will be data loss due to improper use of them. It is necessary to educate employees and make them aware of the importance of protecting business information as much as possible.

Be proactive

Even if you use all the precautionary measures, nothing can guarantee you that your company will not be attacked. For this reason, the best solution is prevention through a disaster recovery solution. A disaster recovery solution is a very complete process that guarantees data protection and recovery in case of failure. Backup is part of disaster recovery, but it is only one of its components. Disaster recovery is a very complete solution since in addition to copying the data also ensures its restoration efficiently in case of natural disasters or infrastructure failures. This type of solution has as a great objective to eliminate (or at least to minimize in large scale) the downtime of a company due to failures. RAAS is a disaster recovery service totally managed by specialized equipment and gives you the possibility to recover a virtual server in seconds.