How To Secure Company Resources While Doing Online Business
We live in an era of digital transformation and the internet. Nowadays all sizes of businesses do online business and sell their services or products on the internet. It is safe to say that doing online business is really profitable and embracing an online business model is a good way to decrease operational costs, and generate more money.
But, while selling products or services online, your company’s resources should be secured and properly safeguarded against cyber attacks. As of 2022, cyber crimes continue to increase dramatically and cyber attacks have become the primary concern for all sizes of businesses.
Today, businesses aren’t in a position to neglect the importance of cybersecurity because at any moment they can be hit by cyber-attacks, and the confidential data that they collect can be stolen.
Collecting confidential data is an important part of organizational operations and being a data-driven business can help you increase the efficiency of marketing efforts as you will be able to target the right audience in the right mediums. But doing so means that your business is obligated to safeguard the confidential data of customers.
If your business becomes a victim of a data breach, you will face serious monetary costs along with damages to organizational reputation and credibility. In this regard, it is crucial to implement modern cybersecurity solutions and the right cybersecurity policies. In this article, we will explain how to secure company resources in four ways. Let’s see each one of them in detail.
On the road to securing company resources, you need to secure user identities.
Merely depending on the passwords or two-factor authentication (2FA) tools is the worst mistake ever, and these methods are literally an open invitation for data breaches because login credentials of employees can be easily stolen and one-time passwords (OTPs) can be possessed.
Simply, these methods are out of date and inefficient to secure identities. To mitigate the risks associated with compromised user credentials, you need to implement multi-factor authentication (MFA) tools.
MFA tools require users to verify their identities through the authentication mechanism by providing two or more factors. Authentication factors can be tokens, security keys, biometrics, or OTPs, and these tools demand users to verify their identities by using a combination of authentication factors.
Depending on the MFA software required authentication factors might vary. For example, MFA software might require users to provide passwords, OTPs, and biometrics while other MFA software might require passwords, tokens, and biometric authentication factors.
These tools enable extra-layer of security for access and keep user identities safe. While using these tools, cyber criminals can’t use compromised user credentials to access your resources unless they provide remaining authentication factors, and in most cases, this is almost impossible.
After securing user identities, you need to provide secure access to users. To do so, using a reputable Virtual Private Network (VPN) is one of the best ways. Additionally, VPN solutions are affordable and scalable, and they can be deployed within a few hours.
VPNs work by creating private tunnels and virtual servers between users and company resources. This way, your employees can securely access company resources even if they use unsecured Wifi connections.
Additionally, VPNs provide great anonymity and online privacy for users. Under any circumstances, VPNs won’t allow third-party individuals to spy on users' activities or track down data transfers.
Because VPNs employ end-to-end encryption, meaning when a user sends a file, VPN locks this data until it arrives at its target. In other words, along the way to its destination, this data will be unintelligible to unauthorized entities. So, VPNs enable robust data protection.
To secure company resources, you need to secure user devices that are accessing them. On the internet, there are tons of malicious websites that are filled with malware, and viruses. While browsing the internet, your employees can encounter these websites and infect their devices with malware or viruses.
These kinds of incidents can put your company resources at risk because malware or viruses can spread to these resources. Although, there are various ways to safeguard users' devices against malware and viruses and antivirus tools are the simplest and cheapest option of all.
Making anti-virus tools available to employees can secure their devices and help you mitigate security risks as these tools will prevent malware and viruses from infecting employees’ devices.
Implementing the Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) solution is the best way to secure identities, devices, and company resources. Zero Trust is a cutting-edge technology and holistic network security solution. Zero Trust definition refers to never trusting users, devices, and applications and always demanding authentication from these entities.
This framework provides a continuous verification procedure for all entities that request access to company resources. Authentication of users is conducted via MFA, biometrics, and single sign-on (SSO) tools.
Additionally, this solution is based on the principle of least privilege meaning everyone in your company has the minimum amount of access to the company resources.
Usually, employees’ user access privileges only include resources that are required for their duties and daily tasks. Simply, employees can’t access resources that are above their access privileges and if somebody tries to access resources that are beyond their duties, Zero Trust architecture will alert IT admins within seconds.
On top of these, Zero Trust provides wider visibility on your private corporate networks, and it helps you map every user, device, and application inside corporate networks.
This framework includes activity and behavior monitoring features that allows you and IT admins to see what employees are doing in real-time or historically. When somebody conducts suspicious activity, Zero Trust detects it quickly and alerts IT admins.
Zero Trust solution help businesses mitigate the security risks associated with external and internal entities. It uses a network segmentation strategy that divides a private network into smaller sub-networks and prohibits lateral movement between subsegments.
Simply, if an attack occurs, Zero Trust will trap attackers on the single sub-segment and won’t allow them to move laterally. In this regard, this solution will minimize the surface areas of possible cyber attacks.
In today’s world, selling products or services online is really profitable. But, to ensure your business’ growth, you need to secure company resources against cyber attacks. On the road to securing company resources, you need to secure identities, devices, and corporate networks and enable secure access to company resources.
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