Cyber security should never be an afterthought – especially not with the current landscape where companies from the small mom-and-pop shops to massive corporations are targeted with almost equal enthusiasm. Yet coming up with a solid strategy can be daunting, especially given all the products on the market today. If you follow these cyber security best practices, you’ll have good footing for getting where you need to be.

Before you can know how to protect yourself, you must know where the risks lie. The most obvious situation is a total lack of a cyber security policy. If you think you are not a target because you are not a Fortune 500 company, you are sorely misled. Also, don’t confuse compliance with cyber security, because you’ll need much more than an accountability policy to keep the cyber criminals away.

Speaking of cyber criminals, most of them are finding success by phishing, usually through email. They’ll slyly trick your employees into clicking on a link that unleashes a threat or fool them into offering up vital information that allows criminals free reign within your system.

Protecting Your Data

Cyber security best practices should include monitoring your IT environment, perhaps even with an automated solution that uses artificial intelligence to keep tabs on your traffic, red-flagging anything that appears to be unusual and could be a threat.

Another recommended step is to educate all of your end users. They should be knowledgeable about all the latest threats and schooled on how other companies have fallen victim, so they don’t make the same mistakes.

You should also be aware of exfiltration, which is the movement of data from a secure system to another, perhaps unknown, party. This is a vulnerable transaction that should be monitored, but it is often left out of cyber security best practices by companies (especially those with smaller IT teams) who find the situation to be too complex.

Cloud Assistance

Given how we access data today – which is often remotely – cloud-based file systems have come into vogue. In the best cloud computing technologies, rather than moving the data to you, the user is moved to the data, which is a more secure approach and a top reason why this method is moving up in cyber security best practices.It doesn’t hurt to partner with a trusted agent who can assist you in finding the solutions that not only fit your budget, but also protect your data. At Access Tech, we offer security, connectivity, and cloud solutions; so if you are seeking out more robust tools to keep your information secure, we have many options for you to consider and will help you narrow down some of the best of them. Contact us today, and let’s get started matching your system with the best cyber security solutions on the market today.