Losing corporate data isn’t the same as losing your keys. Your keys will turn up in the pocket of those ugly-but-comfy loungers you wear when home alone. The data will turn up in the possession of some evil hacker, or not turn up at all. When you lose corporate data, you’ll be stung by one, some, or all of the Big Three Data Loss Hurties, including
- Financial loss from sales, productivity, and client decline.
- Credibility loss: bang goes your reputation as a safe pair of corporate hands.
- Bitter, bitter regret, because data loss is preventable. And you know it.
Dry your tears, and let’s stop the rot now, with a magnificent seven data loss prevention best practices that you can implement quickly-ish.
Your Two Biggest Vulnerabilities
A vulnerability is a weak spot in your defenses against data loss. The most prominent weak spots come in two flavors: technical stuff and people stuff. You’ll need to tackle both to prevent data loss, but there are ways of hitting two monkeys with one banana.
Mobile Device Management (MDM) is the most giant banana because it’s a veritable pleasuredome of security and prevention tools that erase technical vulnerabilities and reduce the risk of poor cyber security practices. Yes, we shouted, because MDM is a no-brainer, which you may have found out by now. After all, we bang on about it all the time.
For some of the data loss prevention best practices below, you’ll need MDM, but not for all of them. Some you can do today, right now. For others, you may need a culture change, strong IT governance, and some nifty security policies, which take time, but are always worth it.
Let’s dive into the crazy awesome world of data loss prevention.
Data Loss Prevention: 7 Best Practices To Enjoy Daily
Let’s start this very minute. Here’s what you can do right now-ish to reduce your data loss risk.
1. Get Yourself Some Sweet, Sweet Mobile Device Management
OK, it might take a bit longer than ten minutes to get MDM up and deployed, but if you give us a call, we can get it done for you by Friday. MDM is how you’re going to facilitate many data loss prevention best practices, all from a friendly centralized dashboard. MDM is clever, which means you can be lazy. With MDM, you can deploy a gazillion data security protocols. This is because it’s big on automation (which reduces human error), monitoring, and changing people’s behavior.
2. Update your OS and Stick Some Anti-Virus Software On Everything
Risk of data loss increases if your operating systems are outdated or your anti-virus and anti-malware software is ancient or non-existent. Use MDM to identify which devices in your fleet have outdated OS or flaky antivirus software, and push users to update their OS and install or upgrade security software. Sorted!
3. Get Cloud Single Sign On (SSO)
Here’s a tasty bite of IT security that everybody will love. Cloud SSO is an identity and access management web tool that gives your people access to all the apps like Slack and Dropbox for work, through a single user identity per person. Once they’re verified, they login once, and away they go. Your people are happy because they don’t need to remember a zagillion passwords for their apps. Your compliance officer buddy is satisfied because you can provide by role and control access. And you’re happy because you have a single gateway to play with, and can reinforce that bad boy with all the levels of hacker-confounding security, including multi-factor authentication. So much happiness.
4. Get Yourself Some Phishing Simulation
We’re not saying that people are the biggest data security risk there ever was, but that’s exactly what we’re saying. We’re not even talking about the mean people behind the phishing attacks that come at us every day. We’re talking about everyday people who are too busy, trusting, or human to think before they click. Phishing simulation is an effective way to train your folk into not being the victims of phishing attacks, even the really, really clever attacks that look exactly like Amazon asking you to add a credit card to your account.
5. Block Iffy Apps and Sites
MDM’s web filtering function allows you to block the use of non-enterprise-approved apps, and to safelist and denylist websites of your choice. This wipes out any chance of Dana in Sales downloading that dodgy app, or anyone being hassled with risky pop-ups.
6. Offboard Securely
You may pride yourself on your exceptionally secure and seamless onboarding procedures (because you already have MDM, right?) but don’t forget offboarding. Insecure offboarding carries risks to data, such as disgruntled ex-staff with revenge fantasies, devices that disappear into the twilight zone, and ex-staff cloud accounts still open and vulnerable. Your shiny new offboarding policy and MDM’s automation will reduce these risks by closing down old accounts, and locking down and wiping that device, should your ex-employee disappear with it forever (hopefully not in a true-crime way).
7. Encrypt Everything That Can’t Run Away
MDM yet again to the rescue. MDM’s automated encryption functionality makes data unreadable gibberish for anyone who isn’t authorized to see it in an ungibberish state. No password, no access. Simple. And if one of your team forgets their password, the data isn’t lost forever because, tada! You’ll get a recovery key to unlock all that corporate goodness.
Reducing the Risks: Let’s Get Started
These are just a few best practices for preventing data loss. We haven’t even mentioned DNS filtering and disabling safe scripts. Or blocking devices from accessing unsecured public wifi. But we’d like to mention them. To you, on the phone. Today. We’re here to make it easy for you to reduce the risk of embarrassing and costly data breaches.
Want to learn more about data loss prevention best practices? Give us a call. We won’t bite. Much.