5 Steps to Improve Data Security

Is your company’s data safe? Data breaches, ransomware, and other disruptive cyberattacks are increasing dramatically. Losses from cybercrime are over $600 billion per year. If your company isn’t meeting this threat head-on, the risks are enormous from financial and legal standpoints. What can you do to minimize these risks?

The bottom line is, if your company data is adequately secured, hackers have to look elsewhere. These steps help define how to keep your data safe and head cyberattacks off at the pass.

Security starts at C level

Unfortunately, one of the biggest cybersecurity threats is from the inside; disengaged employees are a risk. Leadership must understand the human risk from the inside as well as from the outside.  Getting buy-in from your executive team in addressing both human and technical issues is the first step towards ensuring that security is a top priority.

Another point to bring to leadership is that regulatory concerns like GDPR and other laws require companies to comply with a broad spectrum of security measures. These laws are numerous and can be complex. Securing technical and legal help is essential to understand the risks and requirements of bringing leadership on board and putting a plan into place.

Create a plan with concrete goals

Every company has unique requirements for their IT needs, which means security demands are also distinctive. Crafting a plan and implementing against it quickly and efficiently is in your company’s best interests.

While each company’s needs are different, plans should include:

• Forming a response team
• Assessing application and data integrity
• Understanding earliest recovery time objective (RTO)
• Cloud disaster recovery

Most companies aren’t entirely sure where to start or might not have the staff to create and enact a plan. Make sure your plan includes managed cloud services, which help offload the burden from your IT staff and allows them to focus on corporate objectives. Like LoadSpring Solutions, Inc., the best cloud service companies can assist in building out a robust response plan that helps prevent a crisis in the first place and get you back in business if disaster strikes.

Deep clean your data and create data lakes

Not all data is created equally, or locally, or sometimes even logically. In other words, information is often stored haphazardly, which is problematic from a business standpoint and a security standpoint. A critical step in security is to understand where your data resides, what it is exactly, how and if it’s backed up, and ensure that it is all organized, stored, and backed up as best as possible.

Like project-related or financial information, some data is sensitive and valuable and should be stored with maximum efficiency, leaving other data warehoused for easy access and duplication. Efficiently storing data in structures such as data lakes allows for data mining and analytics to occur, which can then increase the overall efficiency of your organization and impact your bottom line for the positive.

And, when hosted with the right cloud provider, structures like data lakes also ensure that extra layers of security protect your valuable information.

Deploy your software securely in the cloud

Complicated software like project portfolio, geospatial, and BIM requires powerful hardware, continual upgrades and patching, and complex firewall setups. Locally hosted software can sometimes contain security loopholes, which often invite unwanted attention.

With cloud-hosted software, patches and firewall issues are handled in the background by your provider, ensuring that potential hijackers never have access to your systems or data. Powerful platforms as a service (PaaS) like LoadSpring Cloud Platform™ deliver the software that your teams need safely, securely, and quickly. Hosted software through LoadSpring offers increased performance over self-hosting and can be accessed wherever your teams need to be.

Choose a security-minded cloud partner

Not all cloud providers are the same, which means some offer better security than others. In 2019, Gartner named the elephant in the room – companies were putting themselves at risk. Three years and one pandemic later, that list is growing exponentially, and the stakes are even higher. When researching and choosing a cloud partner, make sure that you choose a company like LoadSpring. We offer:

Confidentiality: Ensures that information is accessible only by those you authorize. We’ve spent years developing our multi-layered security system that not only defends our network from hackers but also keeps them from gaining information about your projects, networks, and systems.

Integrity: We safeguard the accuracy and completeness of information and processing methods. We protect your data’s integrity against user corruption and disasters by maintaining a finely tuned data backup system, backup testing, and recovery.

Availability: We make sure that authorized users can easily access data and assets whenever needed. We guarantee 24/7/365 access by housing our server and networking equipment exclusively in our worldwide Class-A data center facilities. Each has significant, redundant bandwidth, networking equipment, fire suppression, and auxiliary power.

Meeting today’s security challenges takes planning, hard work, adjusting strategies on the fly, and securing the right help. LoadSpring Solutions, Inc. can help you meet these challenges and help future-proof your company in its ongoing security and digital transformation efforts.

Contact us as part of your overall plan; we can keep the bad guys out and make sure your people have access to the tools they need to keep your company moving forward.