Businesses are regularly exploited, held to ransom, stolen from, and manipulated by nefarious actors making use of holes in IT security. Here are five tips for improving your business’ IT security so that you can keep operating safely.

Require Two Factor Authentication

Passwords and usernames are not secure on their own. Determined hackers can use brute force attacks to work out passwords extremely quickly, and clever villains will use employee’s personal information to figure out likely password combinations. In order to make sure that the wrong people can’t gain access to sensitive accounts, many companies are turning to two-factor authentication.

Two-factor authentication is essentially a way of adding a second checkpoint into the process after a password and username screen. The second authentication factor is usually either biometric or hardware-based. Biometric authentication can involve fingerprint matching, face scanning, or iris scanning. Hardware authentication is usually achieved by a user accessing a special application on their personal mobile phone.

Securely Transfer Files

File Transfer Protocols dictate the communication rules between computers and servers. Communication between computers and servers necessarily involves the exchange of data. A secure File Transfer Protocol is necessary if your business needs to transfer files to and from a server for distribution – such as when your business has a website that contains sensitive information. A good enterprise FTP server is secure, easy to navigate using a client, and prevents websites from being used to gain access to your company’s valuable data.

Improve Staff Training

Staff training is one of the most important methods of keeping a business secure. Employees need to be made aware of the various IT security threats that are faced by the organization so that they can stay vigilant against them and follow the best practices that are prescribed by security experts. Poorly or sparsely trained staff are at a huge disadvantage when trying to prevent security breaches, and as a result, so is the organization as a whole.

Keep Remote Access Secure

Remote working reached a point of near-ubiquity during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. This opened a great many avenues for malicious exploitation of weak remote access security. Requiring two-factor authentication for entry onto all remote working platforms is absolutely crucial if you want to keep your business safe.

Do Away With Portable Storage Devices

Portable storage devices like floppy disks, CDs, and USB flash drives used to be industry standards – letting employees store and move files around easily between devices and locations. Unfortunately, these storage devices pose a huge security risk. The proliferation of USB drive devices has been especially useful to hackers. Nefarious actors can use USB drives to covertly download sensitive information and even transfer malware onto a computer network – compromising network security.

For this reason, it is essential that you do away with portable storage devices at work. Employees should be encouraged to use secure file storage and transfer methods such as approved cloud servers instead.