By Murali K. Nethi is the founder and CEO of SnapBlooms
A certain danger has been growing since the pandemic started. The overnight switch to digital life, online transactions, and remote work has created countless new opportunities for hackers. Cybercrime is up 600% since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, leaving businesses trying to batten down the hatches of their company’s security. Cybercriminals are also employing new techniques within this surge, such as sophisticated email phishing tactics that use coronavirus-themed persuasion methods.
Since an Upwork study found that the remote work trend will continue-businesses need to increase their game in this dog-eat-dog landscape that is now our online reality in order to continue to conduct operations safely. Workplace communication, files, and sensitive data are now circulated externally to a distributed workplace with countless endpoints, making your company data even more vulnerable. Let’s take a look at the top five ways your business can better secure its digital landscape as we move forward with this continued era of remote work.
The importance of an SSL certificate
First things first, you need to have a secure site.
An SSL (Secure Socket Layer) is a certification for a secure connection. An SSL certificate encrypts all the data that passes between your visitors’ web browser and your website’s server where your webpage lives. When you secure your webpage, as seen with the little padlock in the bar, it is much harder for malicious parties to read the information coming to and from your site.
Just a few years ago, many websites were not entirely secure. Typically only the checkout page had SSL certification but companies need to go further and protect their entire site to keep up with the number of external threats and increased digital activity.
This tiny padlock signals to your customers that they can trust your website, and thereby your company-boosting their confidence in the overall business. This is also very important from an SEO perspective because if your webpage is not secure, Google will rank this as a negative factor and downgrade your site to the bottom of the list. Some SSL certificates need to be updated annually, so keep this in mind as well.
The need for a digital security policy
Secondly, a digital policy to help secure and protect your company’s data needs to be put into place. Constructing the rules to a game is no good if people aren’t willing to play though. So, the company also needs to ensure that employees across departments are incentivized to strictly adhere to the company’s digital security policy.
In order to protect company assets, this policy will help employees navigate how to conduct different business scenarios safely. These policies should be translated into onboarding, offboarding, or any internal employee transitions that could change the level of security for an individual.
Let’s say you have an employee working remotely, and their computer breaks. What the business does next should already be determined. The company needs to confirm that physical and digital assets are protected in line with security measures. Inform employees on how to deal with these specific scenarios procedurally, so they can also help to establish a solid cybersecurity foundation.
Encrypted Devices
It is vital to ensure that all digital assets of the company are on encrypted devices. This ensures that even if a physical device is lost or stolen, critical data is not breached. This is important for all businesses but especially for small businesses and startups.
If you want to inhibit employees from using company devices to visit potentially dangerous websites where the structure of your entire business’s cybersecurity could be compromised- it’s important that you have some capacity for managing company computers remotely. Investing in apps that allow the administration to control certain aspects of your business’s hardware are well worth the money.
Examples of this are applications such as Jumpcloud– which gives the directors at your company the ability to oversee their employees’ hardware remotely.
This gives security managers the capacity to disable a computer or intervene to assist the employee if security is threatened. Applications such as this have further benefits as well-helping administrators to onboard new employees that might not be in the same place as them. Administrators can ship the physical laptop and assist new employees safely and securely from a remote location. With the capacity to demonstrate over the screen they can also deploy new apps, such as Skype or Slack, and walk employees through all of the different initiation processes on various platforms that are integral to your company’s work day.
The importance of securing identity
Companies need to ensure that employees only use company-approved hardware to help mitigate the risk of security breach. A report in June 2020 found that 56% of employees reported using their personal computer as their work device. This percentage puts your company even more at risk of a security breach, because you cannot track the digital decisions of more than half of your employees. Once a secure device is in hand and you have outlined the usage rules, the next priority should be to secure the identity of the person using it.
The most sophisticated way to secure personal employee identity is via biometric authentication, such as a fingerprint or face scan. If this capacity isn’t available to your company, or if you just want to employ another level of security, the company should fall back on a strong password protocol that uses two-factor authentication.
Having a password policy is vital to your company’s security infrastructure. It isn’t breaking news, but hackers infiltrate companies on low-tech levels. Because these leaks and hacks tend to happen on the ground level, there is a security risk for the full spectrum of businesses-even those larger ones with state-of-the-art technology.
Enforce employees’ participation with commonsensical measures on their passwords. These include but are not limited to things such as; no sequential numbers, no usage of any part of their name in the password, and definitely not setting “password” as their password.
Internal Company Safeguards
There are other layers of defense that your company can build into it’s digital security infrastructure to strengthen it’s fortress of cybersecurity.
Financial damage due to cybercrime is projected to hit $6 trillion annually by 2021. Writing rules and patterns into your firewalls that flag unusual activity with your cybersecurity team is vital to ensure your business doesn’t get swept into this costly number.
With these parameters in place to recognize anomalies, red flags are picked up quickly and escalated to the right employee so potential threats can be dealt with swiftly. Many companies are now using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to execute this. With capacities like Machine Learning (ML), AI can learn and understand the tactics employed by hackers and formulate your defenses accordingly.
Additionally, ensure a VPN is setup for remote work environments. Because VPNs act as private tunnels for information to be sent back and forth over the internet, having one in place can help to guarantee that the data is encapsulated and encrypted. This can help your company to secure the channels between remote workers’ devices and your central network.
The moral of the story here is that vulnerable information will continue to be transmitted via digital platforms in our technological age. Regardless of which industry you’re in, it is time to level-up in protecting your sensitive data-whether that is your business’s own or that of your customers.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Murali K. Nethi is the founder and CEO of SnapBlooms.com, an online florist marketplace that provides hand-delivered, high-quality flowers to customers by connecting them with local florists. Murali’s background in computer science and 24+ years spent delivering enterprise IT programs, combined with his rich experience running small businesses have allowed him to explore innovative business solutions in the floral industry.
