Tips to Follow – Why is Data Protection for Small Businesses Crucial?

In an era when cybercrime and data breaches are increasing every day, businesses can’t really afford to ignore the importance of enterprise/application security management. From phishing to malware attacks and careless password practices, hackers have literally countless ways to penetrate your company’s digital boundaries and access sensitive information to misuse further.

That’s why most businesses today are implementing business data protection strategies to strengthen the security of their company’s crucial business data.

Below, a panel of experienced security professionals from Cloudester has offered some quick and easy solutions for data protection for small businesses that you can implement in your company and ensure high-end application security management. Follow their tips and data security strategy to make your business more secure.

8 Sure-Shot Data Security Strategies to Safeguard Your Business In 2022-23

To ensure business data protection in your company, you must have a clear roadmap and a well-defined data security strategy that helps to achieve your goals quickly and efficiently

That’s why Cloudester has come up with these tips that will aid in the build-out of a smart and mature data security strategy program and will also help enable a company to be more aware, compliant, and proactive about data security/application security management.

#1. Identify Security Risks for Your Business

Before you start building a plan for data protection for small businesses, it’s important to assess, identify, and modify your overall security posture. A thorough analysis of your current security measures will help to highlight all security gaps present in the company.

Once you have the detailed report, you can determine the further steps to cure the weaknesses with greater resources like funding, new tools, etc.

Once the entire testing and evaluation are done, it’s a great way to deliver the assessment highlights and solutions in a report format. An organization can perform its data risk assessment using its in-house teams and resources. 

But in case, you need to hire application security management experts, Cloudester is here to help.

#2. Perform An Asset Inventory

Asset Inventory is the most crucial part of any data security strategy. It ensures the identification of your most valuable business assets to determine the potential security risks. 

A proper asset inventory is completed by following a set of steps – 

• Step 1 – Start understanding all classifications your company has placed on its data.
• Step 2 – After analysis of all classifications, start mapping your assets to organize their structure and flow.
• Step 3 – Once you have a complete view of all your business assets, you can see what potential threats exist in the context of your company’s data.

By classifying, mapping, and identifying the threats existing in your data, you can prioritize risks and resolve them one by one to protect your business’s attack surface.

#3. Enable Business Data Protection Policy

A very impressive yet effective impact of a good data security strategy is to enable the company to develop its own business data protection policy to set controls, expectations, and enforcement of the human element for accessing the company’s confidential data.

Without following these policies, the employees or users would have no permission to collect, leverage, or share data.

Some common business data protection policies that can be implemented in your organization are –

• Workstation security
• Acceptable use
• Remote access
• Bring your own device (BYOD)

 #4. Mobile Data Security Strategy

With digital things and experience inclining more towards the mobiles, our data is constantly moving in and out of new environments. That’s where the problems start to arise!

Having an appropriate mobile data security strategy will help secure the data located on or accessed from a mobile device. At the same time, not having it, will lead you to a lot of complications. For example, if your mobile or any other device is stolen, damaged, or lost, you will be at higher risk of compromising your personal and corporate data

#5. Secure Your Database

To secure your data, it’s important to secure your databases first. It requires the necessary tools, controls, and measures to manage and maintain a database’s overall integrity. However, there are various considerations in determining a database’s integrity –

• Physical or Virtual Server
• Database Management System
• Third-Party Applications
• Network Infrastructure etc.

Attempted unauthorized access and sharing of data on an unsecured network may result in compromised databases. 

The best way to secure your database is to set a strong data security strategy that includes

• Basic Administrative (Backend) Network Access Controls
• Encrypted Stored Data
• Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) for User Access
• Backed Up Data and 
• Routine Audits.

#6. Cloud Security

With the latest innovations, data is stored in the cloud to prevent security attacks. What if the data stored in the cloud is at risk too?

Well, when it comes to protecting the data in the cloud, there are a couple of key considerations including – 

• Implementing access control policies
• Devising encryption solutions
• Providing regular employee training and 
• Securing endpoints.

These are some of the best ways to secure your data in the cloud from unauthorized access.

#7. Monitor User Behaviours

To understand how data is leveraged on a network, you must track and analyze the users’ behavior first.

To do this, you can even utilize a common intelligence tool that helps in tracking user behavior more effectively. In addition to that, specific tooling, speed, and adaptability are key to tracking the user journey.

Wrapping Up

As the world is becoming more data-driven than ever before, new technology has streamlined the integration and distribution of data for users. Although, with advantages, it has various concerns associated too.

With more technology advancements, more attack surfaces have been unlocked which has resulted in more opportunities for attackers to steal key assets. Hence, having a data security strategy implemented in your organization has become more important.

This article has walked through the importance of data protection for small businesses and how to do it. 

If you need help setting up your company’s own data security strategy, please contact us! Cloudester Software is here to help your business minimize its data security risks. By offering outstanding software solutions, we provide you with high-end durability and availability for your data. We help companies to determine where their areas of weakness are and help them reduce data breach risks with our exclusive data protection strategies.

In case you face any problems and need help in setting up your data security plan, you can always ask for the experts’ help at Cloudester.