Cybersecurity best practices for organizations: Safeguarding your data

October 23, 2023

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Organizations of all sizes and sectors are facing a growing number of cybersecurity threats today. New vulnerabilities and risks that can compromise sensitive data and disrupt critical systems appear together with development of technologies. Thus, it is necessary for organizations to proactively adopt strong cybersecurity practices to protect data, maintain operational integrity, and safeguard their reputation. In this post we will talk about essential cybersecurity best practices that organizations should follow to mitigate potential risks and strengthen their defense.

With a growing number of cyber threats, a proactive approach to cybersecurity should be implemented to safeguard corporate information. At the same time, not only IT department should take care of the organization's security. The following best practices are to be followed companywide to establish a solid foundation for data, systems, and overall business operations protection.

What is data security?

To begin with, it is necessary to understand what data security is. Data security encompasses a range of processes and tools designed to safeguard an organization's sensitive assets. It is crucial to protect valuable data both when it is stored and when it is being transferred. However, strong data security has the following benefits:

• Strengthens company's reputation
• Preserves data integrity
• Complies with data protection and security requirements

Monitor and control who has access to your corporate data

Permissions are important if you need to grant or restrict access to specific information. For example, there is no need for employees from a marketing department to have access to financial information and for a financial department marketing information is not useful.

Privileged access should be granted only to those users who need it to do their job. However, very often such admin accounts cause security breaches since they allow their owners to make critical updates, install software, modify system configuration and many more. Privileged access management (PAM) solution will help keep your data safe and protected by utilizing such features as:

• Just-in-time access to critical resources
• Secure remote access using encrypted gateways instead of passwords
• Privileged sessions monitoring to support investigative audits
• Analysis of unusual potentially harmful privileged activity
• Reports on privileged user access and activity

Keep your password strong

Use reliable corporate messenger for internal communication

Internal corporate communication can become a big breach in data security. However, if you keep all your communication in one secure messenger, this will mitigate multiple risks which are caused by sharing information in multiple cloud messengers, such as Telegram or Viber.

Virola is a secure corporate messenger which will take care of your corporate internal communication security. The following security features are available with Virola:

• Self-hosted solution
• User permissions configuration:
  • Admin permissions
  • App-level permissions;
  • Moderator permissions
  • Chat-room permissions
  • Private permissions

With the help of flexible user permissions settings, you can take control over the way your co-workers use Virola for their internal communication. For example, you can restrict posting and files sharing in certain group conversations to prevent users from sending malicious files and unnecessary information. There are many different ways to set up smooth and secure communication with the help of Virola's user permission settings.

Install updates in time

All the time cybercriminals look for vulnerabilities in operating systems and security software. Thus, to stay ahead of these threats it is necessary to take care of all updates and install them as soon as they become available. This will help to address known software vulnerabilities and this way protect against security breaches.

Train employees to follow cybersecurity best practices

Training is one of the most important parts of cybersecurity. It is necessary for employees to know how to safeguard their corporate and confidential information, what kind of security risks they may face and how to follow corporate security rules.

Very often human errors or lack of awareness can expose the company the cyber threats. Thus, it is necessary to provide regular training to educate employees how to take care of sensitive data, give information about latest cybersecurity threats and raise cybersecurity awareness.