Why Your Disaster Preparedness Should Include Employee Cyber Breach Prevention

The main focus of disaster preparedness and data recovery seems to be on natural disasters like hurricanes, floods, and fires. But, it’s important for companies to understand just how critical it is to also make employee cyber breach prevention a big part of their disaster preparedness plans as well.

The Plain Truth About the Employee Cyber Breach Threat

Those who are most likely to steal your company’s sensitive data aren’t necessarily experienced hackers living halfway around the world. In fact, they might be sitting in your office.

Employees are known to be among the top thieves of corporate data. In fact, 47 percent of employees think that a co-worker might try to obtain someone else’s access rights in order to steal company information, according to a 2015 Cost of Data Breach Study by the Ponemon Institute.

Aside from malicious inside data breach threats, sometimes employees unwittingly access sensitive information and hand it to the wrong people. The maze of complex international privacy regulations has made it harder in some respects for employees to protect data. What is considered sensitive in some jurisdictions may not be in others? And, as more companies rely on outside contractors or allow third-party vendors to access their internal systems, securing data has become an even larger concern.

To prevent employee cyber breaches, more companies are using a “privileged access management” (PAM) solution. This is a tool that allows organizations to control who has access to the company’s various information systems using passwords and other authentication methods. It also creates a continuous audit trail so an organization can see each time an administrator or employee has accessed the systems, when and from where.

How PAM solutions are used varies among organizations based on their particular company’s cybersecurity risks and concerns. But in general, they can:

• Allow companies to designate who can access various systems, and easily turn off someone’s access when it’s no longer needed.
• Require regular password changes among highly sensitive accounts.
• Administer one-time passwords that expire after a set period of time.
• Require users to present multiple types of authentication when logging into certain accounts.
• Frequently rotate passwords to prevent brute-force or offline cracking attacks.
• Record video of privileged users’ logged-in sessions.

Any company can use a PAM solution, but it is particularly useful for a company that:

• Has highly sensitive information or data to protect, such as personally identifiable customer information, which is forbidden by various jurisdictions to be used and/or shared without the express consent of the individual.
• Has outside contractors or vendors who need to access sensitive company systems.
• Lacks the ability to know each time an employee or contractor has accessed a privileged account.
• Wants stronger password protection, allowing each person with access to sensitive accounts to have a unique password.
• May be subject to certain compliance requirements.

Before deploying a PAM solution designed for employee cyber breach prevention, a company should take these steps to ensure it will use it most effectively:

• Understand your risks and needs. Conduct an inventory of the systems or accounts that need protecting and how many people will need to be given access to those accounts. Develop criteria for the types of accounts that should be recorded regularly, and determine things such as how often privileged users should be required to change passwords.
• Create a roadmap. Writing out a plan and objectives for PAM deployment over the next three to five years will help you understand the costs and value.
• Get leader buy-in. Make sure company leaders understand the value of PAM and how it will be implemented. Pushback is likely as PAM will be a cultural change for most IT administrators.
• Keep it manageable. Plan the implementation of PAM to occur gradually, in reasonable chunks rather than all at once. This provides the support team a longer window in which to become familiar with the tool while supporting a smaller subset of end users.

Companies that have sensitive data that need to be protected should be just as concerned about employee cybersecurity breaches as those that come from the multi-various types of cyber attacks.

Our Strategic IT Planning Can Help Prevent Security Breaches.

We provide many IT resources, but the one that matters most to businesses in Colorado Springs is time. Your use of time determines how productive your employees are, how satisfied your clients are, and how successful your business will be.

As such, our computer support strategies can mean the crucial difference between time spent well and time wasted. And, time is money, as we all know.

Accordingly, our IT solutions help prevent employee data breaches, among other things, improve productivity and efficiency, help streamline daily operations, and avail you possibilities for better communication and customer service each day. This is in heavy contrast to poor IT management, which has the tendency to yield all sorts of errors that waste your time, money, and energy – and even put your business in jeopardy.

Our corrective computer services platform reverses this trend by:

• Increasing employee productivity and morale.
• Saving payroll dollars for other human resource allocation.
• Helping facilitate better business opportunities.
• Enhancing your reputation and client relationships, among other things.

And, when in doubt, or if you can’t take the time to address any or all of the concerns regarding employee cyber breach prevention yourself, just call on Colorado Computer Support – your Colorado Springs experts in data breach prevention.

Just call us at 719.439.0599 to learn more or contact us online, and we’ll reply ASAP.  Colorado Computer Support will make sure your business receives customized IT solutions like employee cyber breach prevention from the best computer support company in Colorado, and fill out the other half of your disaster preparedness checklist!