Digital Safety - How Protected Is Your Business?

• 18 June 2019
• Rachael Battersby

As an agency operating within the digital field, safety from a cyber perspective is always on our radar, however this week particularly we have noticed it has reared its head from a media standpoint. So, we thought we would examine the top ten items that you should be considering to ensure that your business and your employees are safe in the digital world.

1. Understand your IT – whether you have an inhouse department that takes care of your IT solutions or you outsource to an IT partner that specialises in providing support – make sure that you have someone dedicated to taking care of your IT systems and most importantly that they know what they are doing. This is not a role you should tag onto the end of someone’s job description. It is crucial to your businesses security and therefore should be taken seriously.


2. Is your website secure – HTTPS? If these letters don’t mean anything to you – go onto your website – check that your url begins with ’https’ and the little padlock is showing to indicate that your website is secure. If it is not visible get in touch with your hosting provider and request that an SSL certificate is added to your webserver.


3. Update your IT Security Policy – and if you don’t have one – create one! This document should give all your employees all the information they need in relation to the business’s IT systems and processes to ensure that they are staying safe in the day-to-day activities of their role. It should include everything from what to do in the event of a systems failure through to how to respond to phishing emails. Failing to prepare is preparing to fail – hopefully you will never need to act on any of the disaster recovery elements included in this document, but you will be thankful that you created it should the unthinkable happen.


4. Data – Ensure you are complaint – the introduction of the GDPR last year gave everyone a shake up in relation to their marketing activities and processes in relation to the capture and processing of personal data. Ensure that you review your Privacy Policy on annual basis and that all your employees are aware of your obligations under GDPR – this should form part of their induction. Compliance is key.


5. Practice safe browsing – as marketeers we spend a large proportion of our time online researching andplanning digital strategy. Ensure that your employees are practicing safe browsing when they are accessing the internet as part of their role. Privacy settings, password policies, download policies, antivirus updates – these are all items that should be considered and communicated to your employees. A Malware or Ransomware attack can happen in seconds and have extensive ramifications for your business. Speak to your IT Department or company to ensure that your defences are in place and up to date.


6. Beware of hackers – a cyber attack can be devastating to your business – this video from Cisco demonstrates just how sophisticated hackers have become at infiltrating and disabling companies
   
   


7. Secure your devices – security doesn’t start and end at your desktop and server – ensure all devices are secure.


8. Departing employees – ensure that when an employee leaves your business you revoke access to all systems and all passwords are updated. IT security needs to be an ever-evolving process, not something that is completed once a year as a tick box exercise.


9. Commit to testing and reviewing of your processes – it is all very well implementing processes and ‘what if’ scenarios but ensure that you test them on a regular basis to make sure that your reaction plans are effective.


10. Get social savvy – your personal social media accounts can reveal an awful lot of information to the outside world – educate your team to make sure that they know how to set their privacy settings and what to look out for in relation to potential phishing scams.

If you would like to find out more about digital security in relation to your marketing speak to us today and we will be happy to help you out.

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