A data breach is when cybercriminals remove, expose, or keep an organization’s confidential data without any prior consent. This technical incident may range from unauthorized access to devices, malicious insiders, accidental loss of records, or human error.
Once a data breach affects a company, it can have severe consequences for its credibility and ability to sustain the trust of its clients. The most expensive part of a data breach isn’t the reputational damage but rather the over-the-top expenses that follow from it.
Hence, companies must hire external consultants and law firms to deal with government agencies and customers affected by a data breach. They spend more on legal fees, credit monitoring services, and hiring experts to help them fix security problems too.
To avoid this costly situation, you must outsource information technology (IT) support to your company through a cybersecurity breach so you can gain these eight benefits, such as:
Recovery Plan Creation
Failure to create a data recovery plan in your company will result in the loss of valuable data. For instance, if you own a financial institution, you might lose all banking transaction information about your clients, including their assets. Similarly, if you run a medical organization, a system outage might erase all treatment data of patients who are actively visiting your facility.
In such situations, it’s essential to have an IT support service that can help you recover data from system interruptions. These professional service providers offer Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) that’ll minimize system downtime by accelerating data and application recovery following an outage. This feature optimizes data replication without impacting production processes so your workforce can continue delivering your customers’ needs.
Access Limitation To Confidential Data
The consequences of not limiting access to confidential business data are that your company may lose valuable information. When an employee leaves your company with confidential information, there’s a chance that they’ll take it with them and use it for personal gain. This incident can be hazardous if the person knows how to hack into your system or knows how to exploit security flaws.
With IT support, you’ll be able to set up user permissions that’ll control who has access to various files and folders on your computers. For example, if you have sensitive customer information in an email folder on your computer, you may want only certain company employees to access those documents. In turn, anyone outside your organization will not be able to access the file if they don’t have permission.
Breach Extent Determination
Failure to determine the extent of the data breach may result in multiple investigations by various regulatory bodies. In addition, these authorities will demand you to pay costly fines for being non-compliant with data protection laws. Aside from that, you’ll lose the trust of your customers within your company for not prioritizing data protection as well.
When you work with IT support, they’ll help you identify the damage caused to your company by this breach. These professionals will determine how many people have been affected by this breach. After that, they’ll recommend necessary measures so you can prevent similar incidents from happening again in the future.
Affected Hardware Cleanup
A data breach may have a long-term effect on your business. And if you don’t clean up the hardware affected by this incident, you might lose the faith of your investors, which slows down your growth projects. Additionally, employees might start looking for new jobs elsewhere when they don’t feel secure with their jobs due to these losses.
If you suspect that malware or spyware is infecting your computers, you should immediately contact an IT support team. They’ll check it out for you and possibly remove it before things worsen. Once you do so, you can sustain your investors’ trust and retain top talent who contribute to company expansion.
Advanced Cloud Security
Cloud security assures you that all vital information is readily available to authorized users. When your top management can access this company data, they can assist your employees with crucial tasks and boost their productivity. On the other hand, not having this protection will cause system failure due to human error, which results in downtime in business processes.
IT support can scan your system for vulnerabilities to identify weak points in your network that hackers might exploit to disrupt your operations. These cloud providers provide everything from storage to applications and are responsible for maintaining your infrastructure. As a result, you won’t have to worry about frequent updates or system maintenance that might prevent your team from accessing files.
Multi-Factor Authentication
Multi-factor authentication requires different components to verify your identity before the system grants you access. This option requires you to enter your password and one-time passcode sent via text message (SMS) or email before the login process proceeds. But if you don’t enable this security alternative, cybercriminals can steal passwords and user accounts for illegal activities.
When you partner with IT support, they’ll help you set up multi-factor authentication within your systems and digital accounts. If an unauthorized user accesses your account, this team will notify you if the incident comes from a different location.
Keeping Systems Up-To-Date
Companies spend millions of dollars on security software and firewalls to protect their information from hackers. Unfortunately, if they fail to update their systems regularly, they expose their data to hackers. Besides, it might be impossible for your staff to use new technologies compatible with the latest software and hardware.
IT support provides the IT infrastructure that allows your organization to run smoothly. They include keeping servers up-to-date, backing up data, monitoring systems, and responding to problems. In turn, you’ll gain peace of mind knowing that hackers can never access your newly updated systems.
Data Encryption
Encrypting data allows you to revoke unauthorized access to sensitive business information. Without this information encoding process, a hacker steals your customer database and uses it to launch phishing attacks against customers. As a result, your clients will risk identity fraud, which can affect your brand image.
With the help of IT support, you’ll be able to prevent hackers from compromising data by managing your network’s security protocol. Aside from that, they’ll configure all computers with the right anti-virus software to support encryption. Further, they’ll secure your business’ online sites with hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) codes to safeguard users from man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks.
Key Takeaway
Being an entrepreneur means you must take necessary measures to protect your company’s sensitive data. Thus, you must outsource expert IT support who’ll help your business through a cybersecurity breach. Once you do so, you can safeguard the image of your company so your investors will always support you and encourage loyalty from more customers.