Digital assets are crucial to business growth. You can use them to claim expenses, establish goodwill, and increase your company’s value when you sell the business. However, unauthorized access to digital assets could bring your business to a halt and lead to legal suits from customers and loss of credibility. Read on for five ways to protect your business’s digital assets.
1. List your business’ digital assets
The first step to securing your company’s digital assets is listing them. This gives you a comprehensive understanding of your business’ asset inventory. Your company’s assets include a business website, client information, and lists, social media accounts, apps, videos, photos, imagery, and intellectual property such as patents, copyrights, and trademarks. Be sure to define these assets by category to ascertain that additional property or content does not go unnoticed.
2. Data encryption
Whether your company’s data is in transit or at rest, it is often vulnerable to hacking and theft. Consider protecting a company’s data when in transit by encrypting it before transmitting it. You could use HTTPS, also referred to as TLS 1.2 protocol, to encrypt digital data. This tool takes the message you intend to share and then splits it into parts. Using an algorithm controlled by a public key, this tool mixes the split details. Once you send the message, the TLS 1.2 protocol on the recipient’s end takes the data and then decrypts it via a private key.
You could also invest in a digital asset management system to encrypt data. This software adds enterprise-level functions and protocols like watermarks in visual assets to prevent unauthorized access to the company’s confidential data.
3. Use two-factor authentication
Creating passwords can help prevent access to personal digital assets. However, with recent technological advancements, hackers are developing sophisticated strategies to access confidential information. Using a single phishing email, a hacker can quickly tell your password no matter how complex it is, so you should consider setting up two-factor authentication (2FA).
2FA requires you to answer a specific question or enter a one-time generated code sent to your mobile phone before accessing business data to confirm your identity. This implies that even if your primary password has been compromised, the hackers cannot access your digital assets. Be sure to implement two-factor authentication on all your company’s applications, including Slack, Gmail, Salesforce, Google Drive, and Facebook.
4. Limit access
Employee negligence is one of the greatest threats to your business’s digital assets security. Your staff may fall victim to phishing scams, expose crucial data through their smartphones, or click suspicious links that infect your data storage with viruses. For these reasons, you should limit user access. Not every employee should have access to all digital applications and assets. You could achieve this by implementing authorization levels so that an employee only accesses files, applications, and data relevant to their job description. Be sure to develop a robust offboarding plan to keep departing employees from accessing your company’s digital assets.
5. Keep your security knowledge current
Security is an ever-evolving field as hackers are always fishing for new ways to access digital assets, so you have to keep your security knowledge up-to-date to stay ahead of threats. You could join online courses or forums that discuss current cybersecurity issues such as common security threats in your industry, threat detection, risk assessment, and software-specific patches and exploits.
Endnote
With the advancements in technology today, there is an influx in data breaches, so you need to protect your business. Implement the above strategies to secure your business’ digital assets to protect its financial viability and revenue stream.