How to Protect your Organisation from Cyber Threats

In our last piece we focused on the most common forms of cyber-attack threats that organisations face. In this piece, we will look at some of the best practices you can follow to keep your organisation secure.

Basics of Cyber security

Good data backup

If you’ve ever had that gut-wrenching feeling that you’ve lost access to your work, you’ll already understand how important backing up your data is. By keeping data backed up, you can ensure that your IT systems and data will be preserved in the case of an attack. If an organisation were to lose access to its data permanently, it would create a huge setback and headaches!

The backup rule of 3-2-1 is advisable. It is easy to implement; you must always have three copies of your data, two of which must be on different storage media, and one of which must be kept offsite for disaster recovery. After implementing this, you can unwind be at ease, knowing that there will always be a way to continue working when you have three copies of your data located within three distinct locations.

Data backup is by far one of the best tools to help you achieve risk management, which is the core concept of cyber security. This enables an important risk-management capability; the ability to get back up and continue working. As you’ll likely have seen, customers are not always the most understanding people, and so clients and partner organisations will ultimately expect your business to have good cyber security so that it can continue to meet its obligations despite cyber security threats.

Secure passwords

We have all heard the advice that using repeated numbers, symbols, or sequences is improper, and that using 12345 or ABCD is insufficient. Excellent passwords are fully random, hard to remember, and have no connection to you at all— but just hard enough that you won’t forget them yourself.

To guarantee that they are operating as safely as possible, teach your employees to adhere to the following password practices.

• Use multi-factor authentication when it’s available.
• Keep this in mind when you enter the password; if it’s too simple to remember, try again. Go outside the box a bit and be mysterious. Avoid readily remembered consecutive passwords and repeated digits (such as 1234, 6789).
• Whenever possible, use a combination of letters and digits to make your password longer than 10 characters; the rule of thumb for passwords is that the longer, the better.
• Use random upper- and lower-case letters when creating your passwords. For instance, instead of starting with a capital letter at the beginning like everyone else, you can consider doing it towards the conclusion or even at random intervals throughout. The more obscure, like we mentioned, the better.
• Change your password on a regular basis; sometimes accounts are compromised without the account holder’s knowledge.
• Another option is to use password management software, which can intelligently remember super-complex and hard to crack passwords within your organization in a secure way.

Considering that passwords constitute the first line of defence against cyberattacks, they are the most crucial of all. Yet often, users frequently don’t view passwords in this way, understandably, they can view them as a hassle that gets in their way.

Longer passwords can be tedious to type in each time which is one reason why staff can find them to be a hassle to use, but by educating them on the importance of security, you can get more buy in and implementation of security best practices across your organisation. At the same time, you can streamline logging in using automated two-factor authentication that strikes a balance between ensuring security and providing ease of access to your staff.

Manage permissions

Managing permissions is a cornerstone for ensuring security across your organisation. Without controlling permissions, your network security will have fewer layers of protection, as more users will be able to access sensitive data across the network. You can manage permissions through many cloud-based software including Microsoft’s Office 365 and Google Workspace to ensure that the right people have access to the information that they need, without compromising wider security.

Anti-malware measures

Anti-malware measures go far beyond having free anti-virus software on your devices, these softwares provide a very minimal level of protection that will not be enough to stop the majority of cyber threats today. As a minimum, getting paid subscriptions for professional anti-virus softwares, alongside these other security measures, can provide your organisation with the security it needs to robustly defend itself against the most common threats.

Data encryption

Cyber criminals will try to take control of your data by encrypting it. While it may sound paradoxical, one of the ways to protect yourself against this is to encrypt your data yourself! Encryption is when your information is encoded into a secure format that stops your documents and files from being directly readable. Within an organisation, internal encryption of data and documents helps to ensure that only those who are authorised can access them.

We hope that by highlighting the basics of implementing cyber security across your organisation, you can act and create a shield against the most common threats. In doing so, your online environment and networks will be safer, more reliable, and operate more smoothly in an interconnected digital world.

Unlock the potential of your IT and keep it secure with Computing Dynamics

Computing dynamics are holistic specialist providers of managed IT support in the UK that help businesses to upgrade, maintain and secure all aspects of their IT so that they can grow their business with confidence. If you’d like some friendly, expertise-driven guidance for your business on its technology journey, get in touch today!