Your Biggest Security Threat are Your Employees

It’s not a secret that businesses require some form of management to operate effectively and efficiently. From defining key roles and responsibilities for each employee to interacting with clients, managers hold a lot of responsibilities—especially when it comes to information security.

There’s a huge misconception that risks and security incidents should be handled on a case-by-case basis, often after the breach has occurred. This belief is entirely misguided and something that your business cannot afford to believe. Recent studies show that sixty percent of hackers can breach an organization’s safeguards within just a few minutes. It’s painfully apparent that data security should be a major concern for your business.

Now it’s time to address the elephant in the room regarding your data safety—your employees.

No matter what application, program, or unified threat management system that you use to protect your data, it’s only effective if your employees know how to use it. According to David Anderson of Clifton Larson Allen, “This is the social aspect, targeting the end-user. This is the #1 way to attack an organization.”

Training your employees to have strong passwords and securely share information is critical. But you can’t expect for your employees to be compliant with your security demands if you don’t define their specific security roles and responsibilities.

Plan how you’re going to approach your data security by ensuring that you have the appropriate managers and overseers in place. Once this is done, assess the potential risks and create hierarchical solutions that can be repeated. When you’re ready to move forward, be sure to assign the following roles:

• Security Committee: Those on this board will review your organization’s security management policies and will provide leadership, guidance and oversight to security problems.
• Management: In small organizations, this could also be the security committee. Once the security plan has been approved, the group will communicate the process to all parties and employees.
• IT Management Firm: Your IT solutions provider would be responsible for data processing and your overall business network. They will also interact with the security committee to create a security policy and is responsible for implementation. When it comes to Managed Services, just make sure to communicate the security solution properly to your clients and management.
• Data Owners: These members classify the information within their jurisdiction by reviewing its value and sensitivity. They discover the implications that losing their data means. They also determine the type of access that each employee will receive.

Users: In this case, these are the staff members that have to comply with your security policy. Ensure that they don’t disclose or share their login credentials and passwords with anyone, including other employees.