Given many businesses growing remote working teams, it’s not surprising that these companies are looking into ways in which they can tighten up their cybersecurity over the festive season. With people tapping in to work from home over quieter periods of the holidays and, at a time where there will be fewer people around to help mitigate the effects of a cyber attack, ensuring your business is well protected against threats and attacks is vital.
Not only is this good business practice for remote workforces, but helps to keep your business safe throughout the year. Let’s take a look at some of the ways in which you can improve and tighten up your business cybersecurity over the coming festive season.
Restrict Access To Certain Platforms
A lot of what businesses do now is all based online, meaning that there are streams of data and personal information stored in networks and documents online. In an increasingly more remote business world, where employees may work solely from home or interchange between home and the office, more devices have access to these details and over Christmas, when people are travelling around or using different wifi connections if staying with friends and family, these details can easily become compromised.
In order to prevent this from happening over the festive break, look to restrict access to certain platforms, networks or documents, granting access only to those employees who really need it. This access can be easily reversed when you need to grant access again, but in the meantime this helps reduce the risk of important information being compromised.
Carry Out A Backup Of Essential Data
When it comes to cyber security best practices, you should be regularly backing up data anyway, but before the festive break, where networks and devices may go unmonitored for longer periods of time, this is absolutely vital. Sometimes, even despite your best efforts, hackers and cyber criminals are still able to gain access into your business.
But, having a backup of your business data can make it easier to recover your website in the event of an attack and help things to get back up and running again. Consider implementing a cyber incident response plan which includes regular physical back ups of your data and steps as to what employees must do in the even of a breach. Having this in place over the festive season can help massively in the event of a cyber attrack or hack and ensures that employees know what they must do to mitigate the effects.
Implement Two-Factor Authentication
Perhaps one of the quickest and easiest ways to tighten up your cybersecurity as a whole, not just for Christmas, is to implement two-factor authentication. This simply means adding an extra layer of login protection and there is two, rather than just one, pieces of login information. This could be a secure question which only employees know the answer to, an authentication code generated by an app or a one time passcode being sent to a secure device. This is a quick and easy way to provide an additional layer of security to your website and one which doesn’t involve much, if any, cost.
If you’re not sure how best to protect your business over the festive season, or any time throughout the year, there are many companies offering cyber security services to provide a high level of protection to your business. Whether you want comprehensive security services, or protection for a certain area of your business, there will be plenty of help and advice available.