How clean is your business? I’m not talking about whether or not you employ cleaning staff at your office. I’m speaking about your systems and data. About digital hygiene.
You’ve probably heard the term once or twice, usually in the context of cybersecurity. And while security is certainly a major component of your organization’s cyber-hygiene, it’s only one facet. Hygiene is about more than protecting your business’s assets.
It’s about knowing where those assets are, what they do, and why you use them. It’s about making your business operations more organized, capable, and effective in the digital realm. In short, it’s something everyone should be aware of, yet few are.
Let’s change that. Read this hygiene checklist and see which of these you’re currently doing.
This includes hardware, software, and applications. Through this documentation, you should be able to know at a glance what any system or file is, what it does, why it’s important, and to whom it’s important.
Documenting hardware and applications is fairly simple. Documenting files, not so much. A secure enterprise file sharing and synchronization platform is a wise investment - it will allow you to not only organize sensitive assets for easier access but maintain visibility over them as well.
Awareness and diligence are your best weapons in the war on cyber-crime. Stay cognizant of exploits and attacks.
A strong password policy combined with other forms of access control (device-based, biometric, or behavioral authentication, to name a few) is extremely important.
And not just for cybersecurity. Software updates are also important for addressing usability and functionality.
Whenever you examine an employee’s access permissions, ask yourself if they need those permissions to do their job. If the answer is ‘no,’ they shouldn’t have them.
Sometimes, the unexpected will happen — a system will fail or a hacker will compromise your network. You need to be prepared for that, and automated backups of important files and systems allow you to be.
While old hardware isn’t necessarily a security risk, it is a sign of poor cyber hygiene.
Working with both internal and external experts, run checks of the following:
That way, if the worst does happen and you suffer a breach, you’ll have a bulwark against the damages.
These plans should include a clear delineation of roles and responsibilities, guidelines for external and internal communication, and the recovery process.
Even if your business is clean, associating with a vendor that doesn’t value data hygiene security can figuratively leave mud on your face. Hold other organizations to the same standards as your own.
So after having read that list, how clean is your organization?
And what do you need to do to make it cleaner?
Tim has a demonstrated history of working in the information technology and services industry.