Proactive security: how to keep your online data safe without unnecessary spending
Small businesses are at a higher risk of being attacked by cybercriminals than big enterprises. Their online security is supported by fewer resources and extensively depends on the human factor. In the trend of protecting U.S. businesses, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) issued the Small Business Cybersecurity Act driving publicity to the burning topic. It worked. Three weeks ago the president signed it into law.
Small businesses are not immune to threats, and are often not equipped with the IT resources or personnel to protect their networks. – Dirk Morris, chief product officer at Untangle
A reactive vs a proactive approach to data security
A number of small businesses still use a reactive approach to any kind of cyber attack. A reactive approach is when a company detects malicious activity, it reacts immediately with an incident response plan. Unfortunately, the reactive approach doesn’t work anymore.
Let’s take a closer look at the average data breach as an example. The average cost per record in a data breach (which includes the cost of investigation, legal, PR, remediation, etc.) is about $141 per record (2017 Ponemon Institute Study). This means a data breach of only 1000 records, will cost a company an average of $141,000. Just the cost of notifying customers of a breach can cause a company irreparable harm. So it comes as no surprise that almost 60% of smaller companies are out of business within six months of suffering a cyberattack.
A proactive approach involves a security strategy, that thwarts potential breaches as early as possible. It is also very effective to have protective security layers for each stage of a cyber attack.
Threat Protection
Antivirus, endpoint protection, and application whitelisting are just a few types of security solutions that can neutralize a threat the moment it appears. If your company uses a digital document solution, pay close attention to the security standards that the platform should be compliant with. Small companies that don’t have extensive cybersecurity resources especially benefit from using PDFfiller for document sharing and storage due to its affordability. PDFfiller complies with the very same digital transaction security standards followed by both PayPal and Stripe. For the protection and secure storage of medical documentation, PDFfiller stands alongside other American health care providers such as Blue Cross Blue Shield and Kaiser Permanente as 100% HIPAA compliant. We actively integrate the most modern security systems into our own processes and do all security software updates for you.
System Protection
Cyber attacks from a third party can’t succeed without the criminal first gaining access to the system containing any sensitive data. With PDFfiller, you can choose between several types of user verification, including two-factor authentication and logon monitoring. By having a logon monitoring system in place, you will be informed about any misuse of credentials, well before an actual data breach occurs. And two-factor authentication can be easily activated with just a few clicks in your account’s settings.
Data Protection
Data is particularly sensitive If you work at a publicly traded company. Even upcoming press releases can be used to conduct illegal marketing practices. Therefore, it’s important that you find a way to monitor the data you consider valuable. File security is one of the many benefits of adopting a reliable digital document solution.
All PDFfiller data is stored in Amazon S3 data centers which have multiple backup locations, instant and uninterrupted data access, and military-level physical security. And by securing the transmission of your data with a 256-bit encryption algorithm, the data sent between users, or a user and server, is protected and secure.
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