Data security is becoming a pressing issue for business leaders nowadays, simply because it only takes a single security breach to ruin a brand’s reputation, alienate consumers, and drive the company straight into the ground. The modern customer values their privacy, so if they share their personal information (such as credit card info) with your company, they expect you to guard that information with your name and your brand. Naturally, you can’t allow a single act of social engineering or a single cyberattack to be successful if you want to preserve your brand’s reputation over the long term.

Yet, you never know, someone might try to breach your firewalls, or an inept employee might give away sensitive information via email thinking that they are sending it to the right person. Needless to say, you have to avoid these scenarios at all costs, so let’s take a look at the five tools and solutions you need to introduce in order to safeguard your business.

Combine Software and Hardware Firewalls

Every device in your company needs to have the proper software firewall installed as the first line of defense against nefarious online activity, malicious files and executables, and more. However, it’s not enough to launch a firewall straight out of the box, because ready-to-go software is rarely optimized to the exact needs of your company and your employees. This results in a subpar security measure that is bound to let something slip through the cracks at one point or another. It’s important that you optimize all software firewalls on every device with the right settings and levels of security.

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Next, be sure to introduce a hardware firewall into the workspace as well. This is a physical device that safeguards your entire network and all of your devices by acting as a proxy between your workspace and the online world. You can use it to filter incoming traffic and protect all of your devices, even in the case when an operating system stops working.

Use Data Encryption Tools

Nowadays, business data is exchanged every day, all day, through numerous devices. From the smartphones, your employees use to manage work on the go, to their laptops and stationary PCs, every device is a potential security risk if it falls into the wrong hands, or if your employees accidentally send sensitive data to the wrong person. Assuming that you have conducted comprehensive workshops with your employees pertaining to information storage and management to prevent the latter problem, you can minimize the risk of data leaks with encryption tools.

These tools serve to encode all data and make it accessible only to the people with the corresponding encryption key. This means that when you send sensitive information to someone, they need to have the right key in order to decrypt the data, but that doesn’t mean that encryption prevents the data from falling into the wrong hands. It does, however, make it impossible for someone to view it, which makes it a powerful security tool.

Monitor your network in real-time

No matter how well-educated your employees might on proper online conduct and data management, and no matter how powerful your firewalls might be, that still doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t monitor your network or that you should let your employees send and receive sensitive data as they please. Instead, your goal should be to retain as much control of your internal network through a reliable secure web gateway that will allow you to restrict access to certain websites, monitor all incoming traffic, and elevate your cybersecurity measures across the board.

In turn, a network security tool will help you keep your employees productive by limiting their time on non-work-related websites (which minimizes the chance of data leaks), it will help you optimize bandwidth usage, and even leverage intelligent P2P identification to stay in control of your network on all fronts.

Close all Potential Data Leaks

Another important tool you should consider integrating into your operation is a vulnerability scanner. This is a handy tool that will automatically detect any security weak points in your system, and advise you on the best way forward. You can use this tool to not only identify weak points but also prioritize them and schedule maintenance and upkeep. This way, your IT consulting company or cloud provider will have an easier time optimizing your infrastructure to your exact requirements.

Up your Password Strength

On a final note, always remember that passwords serve as the first line of defense for your business, which is why you can’t let your employees create their own passwords, as they tend to be predictable and weak. Instead, be sure to use a password management tool that will generate truly randomized passwords for all devices and applications, which will deter all intruders simply because they are nearly impossible to crack.

Wrapping Up

The threats of cyberattacks and social engineering are too real nowadays, which is why elevating data security should be one of your top priorities. Integrating these tools will allow you to safeguard all of your business data, and in turn, safeguard your brand’s reputation.