How to keep data safe within your organization

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Communication within an organization is an essential part of any workflow. However, the larger your organization is, the more complicated becomes the interaction process between employees and departments. As a rule, various misunderstandings and data losses happen due to improperly organized communication workflow and lack of permissions structure in the corporate messenger software.

Using a single tool for corporate communication is not always enough to preserve data safety. It is necessary to follow certain security rules and guidelines to prevent sensitive information leakage and data theft.

Use secure and reliable software for internal communication

To mitigate possible security risks, it is important to examine the entire data landscape and ensure that all communications are conducted through reliable and secure corporate messenger. It is also desirable to minimize the number of applications used for data exchange. You need to create an ecosystem which will guarantee your internal information security.

However, before you start it is necessary to make a list of the processes within your organization, for example:

  • Corporate communication via messenger
  • Video and audio conferences
  • File sharing and storage
  • Documents exchange
  • Employees training and issues troubleshooting
  • Tasks and issues management

All above mentioned processes require special apps. However, the less applications involved, the more secure your information will be. With Virola corporate messenger you can do this from one app and keep data safe within your organization.

Share with your team data security best practices

It is important to ensure that everyone in your organization understands company's security policy. There are several ways to educate your employees:

  • During the onboarding process
  • During so called re-fresher training
  • During regular meetings

All these methods are worth carrying out as they will help to ensure that everyone heeds the practice and takes care of corporate data security. While working in hybrid environment more and more employees use their own devices where documents are not properly encrypted and securely protected. As a result, this increases the likelihood of information leaks. Therefore, it is important to ensure everyone is on the same page and follows organization security guidelines.

Safeguard your passwords

A weak password can cause many problems. If your data is compromised, this can lead not only to the identity theft but also to the leakage of corporate data. To prevent this from happening it is necessary to follow simple security guidelines for password protection:

  • Make your password strong:
    • Avoid common words and characters combinations;
    • Use special characters and digits;
    • Make passwords longer than 8 characters;
  • If you write your passwords down keep them in a file on an encrypted disc
  • Reusing passwords in different accounts is a bad idea
  • Use two-factor authentication

Limit access to those who need it

Both in large and small organizations not all employees need to have access to specific information, for example financial one or other employees' personal details. For such cases it is necessary to limit access to those who are responsible for specific processes within an organization.

However, in some situations it is worth introducing permissions control for communication software. For example, there are several departments in your organization, but employees working there never meet and you would like to keep all communication separated. In Virola corporate messenger it is possible to do this with the help of permissions settings which restrict creating public and / or private chat rooms. In this case people in your company will be able to communicate only with those employees who were approved by the account admin.

You can also create group chat rooms to post corporate news and useful information and restrict communication in them while allowing messaging in other chat rooms. This is very convenient if you would like to avoid mess and make internal communication secure in your organization.

Protect your network

The wireless network in your office or at home of your employees if they work remotely can be a weak spot. Hackers can pounce on it without any warning. Thus, the right solution will be to encrypt the whole wireless network. This will make it invisible to hackers.

Each organization has its own structure and policies. However, by following these recommendations you will be better prepared to handle cyberattacks or data and identity theft attempts.