How to Protect Your Employee and Business From Cybersecurity Threats

1. Provide Employees with Company Devices

While this measure is capital intensive, providing your employees with company devices can protect your business and employees from cyber criminals. Company devices with stringent security protocols, proper firewalls, antivirus software, and good user experience can limit exposure risk to cybersecurity threats without affecting productivity.

Although onsite employees would most likely use company devices, remote workers have much more to gain from company devices because using personal devices can invite unknown computers and mobile devices onto the organization’s IT infrastructure, undermining their security standards. A company device will have proper firewalls and antivirus software. Furthermore, it gives your employees the right tools to succeed.

2. Train Your Employees on the Best Cybersecurity Practices

Employees are a source of weaknesses in any cybersecurity efforts. As a result, proper training focused on ensuring a high level of security without compromising the standards and conventions of the business should be fundamental. Training includes identifying email phishing attempts and other cybersecurity threats, spotting attacks before or as they happen, and knowing what to do in case of a cyber attack.

You can foil attempts to infiltrate secure remote network environments and steal personal data with proper training. Furthermore, employees can be your IT department allies in protecting company, employee, and client data.

3. Use Strong and Secure Passwords

As a business, you set a standard on the password that employees use, as what employees consider a strong password might differ from yours. Standards guidelines you set include:

• Make compulsory the use of special characters, uppercase and lowercase letters, and numbers in the password
• Use at least 12 characters long
• Ensure they do not use passwords related to the business or employee name and belongings.

Aside from creating a strong password, you should create a guideline for employees to follow to keep their passwords secure. Below are a few that you can implement:

• Avoid sharing company passwords with anybody, even friends and family members.
• Do not send the company password via unsecure communication means such as emails and text messages.
• Avoid using the password as a credential for other platforms such as banking, social media, or online shopping.
• Use a secure password manager that updates stored passwords, encrypt them, and requires multi-factor authentication.
• Do not write company passwords on sticky notes or cards.
• Immediately change passwords when employees suspect a compromise.

4. Enable Multi-factor Authentication

Ensure that company IT infrastructure is only accessible to employees after multi-factor authentication (MFA). MFA will require employees to sign in with their credentials and a one-time code generated by an app. This will further add a layer of security to prevent people from guessing or stealing your password.

5. Take Advantage of Cloud Computing

Another way to protect your employee and business from cybersecurity threats is by using cloud computing. Unlike an onsite server, cloud computing provides businesses with a great baseline of protection. Generally, a cloud computing service will provide businesses with a secure cloud-hosted environment and integration with computer resources for employees. As a result of the high focus on security, business and employee data are kept safe.

6. Limit Access to Sensitive Data

Another foolproof way to protect business data is to limit the employee’s access to sensitive data. Consequently, this will reduce vulnerabilities of data. However, it can also result in productivity loss.