With today’s business world dealing with the realities of rapidly advancing technology and a market that is more digitally centralized than ever before, companies must be prepared to implement security measures that protect sensitive information and streamline their operations. Information technology (IT) protocols can be an invaluable resource that helps to keep your business on the right side of privacy mandates and serves as an important foundation for your day-to-day practices.
Below, we’ll take a look at some of the core principles that inform IT security, as well as the benefit of partnering with an external Canadian partner like Solūt. Read on to learn more!
Confidentiality Counts
Confidentiality is the cornerstone of IT security and a driving force that pushes the industry forward. IT security ensures that access to sensitive information is limited to the appropriate parties and that there are sufficient measures in place to prevent unauthorized access. Encryption is a key technique used to maintain confidentiality, relying on converting plain text to scrambled unreadable data that prevents the wrong parties from accessing data even if they somehow manage to access the system itself. Modern encryption algorithms employ complex mathematical functions, making it exceedingly difficult for attackers to decipher the encrypted data and increasing your overall data protection.
Maintaining Data Trustworthiness
IT security is heavily concerned with ensuring the accuracy and reliability of sourced data, or in other words, its integrity. One crucial practice to maintain data integrity is the use of digital signatures. Digital signatures verify the authenticity of data by using cryptographic algorithms to create a unique signature that can only be produced by the original sender. If any changes are made to the data, the signature becomes invalid, alerting recipients to potential tampering. With businesses now storing ample information in the cloud (more on this below), ensuring your data remains trustworthy is essential to protect yourselves, as well as your clients.
Ensuring Continuous Access
IT security isn’t just focused on protecting data. IT consultants are also there to ensure you have easy access to your system as needed. Denial of Service (DoS) and server hijacking crimes have become a common threat in the digital world, often leaving businesses struggling to get back on their feet in the aftermath. Partnering with the right IT consultant can help build safety plans to circumvent such attacks and always have a backup plan (more on that below) when trouble does arise.
Verifying Identities
Know Your Customer (KYC) and other such anti-fraud measures have become increasingly necessary to remain compliant with domestic and international regulations, and IT plays an integral role in making them possible. By implementing standard authentication processes like passwords, PINs, biometric data (such as fingerprints or facial recognition), and two-factor authentication (2FA) unauthorized users have a significantly reduced opportunity to access sensitive information, and go a long way towards preventing fraudsters from sneaking in the “back door”.
Controlling Access
Speaking of sneaking in, hacking into a system or accessing it through other illicit methods is exactly what IT security aims to prevent. Authorization is the next step in protection after authentication and ensures that only users with the right “roles” can access the right data. In fact, role-based access control (RBAC) is a widely used authorization framework that assigns permissions based on predefined roles, streamlining processes and simplifying security at the same time.
Staying Current
One of the most difficult aspects of IT security and cyber security as a whole is that cyber criminals and hackers evolve their tactics almost as quickly as new protection methods and software enter the market. The reality is, IT is a 24/7 job that requires constant maintenance and reeducation to stay on top of emerging trends and make use of new standards and tools. For most businesses, the cost of having an internal team do so while regulating your current systems and addressing problems on the fly can be unsustainable in the long term, with the necessity for multiple new salaries to fill a department significantly increasing your expenses.
Working with an external consultant can be far more cost and time-effective by ensuring you have ready access to a paid team of experts who are able to allocate specific time to learning new pain points to watch for and how to overcome them.
Security Awareness and Training
The perfect IT security strategy means nothing if the humans on your team don’t understand the purpose and core involvement they’ll have in utilizing protective measures. Some of the most common scams and cyber attacks in the market include social engineering, phishing attacks, and other tactics that target human vulnerabilities to gain unauthorized access, many of which can often be avoided through awareness training. The right IT partner will empower your team to step in when and how they can, while still laying out how to stay in a preventative rather than reactive mindset.
Prepared for the Worst
Let’s acknowledge an uncomfortable truth: the unfortunate reality is, with cybercrime posing a significant threat to businesses across Canada, it is highly likely that almost every owner will eventually find themselves facing an IT-related breach or issues. Having a comprehensive backup and disaster recovery plan is essential, and can save your business, as well as your clients countless headaches and necessary moments of stress by simply being prepared.
Meet Solūt
At Solūt, we know how important IT security is when it comes to protecting your business. With over 20 years of experience partnering with a wide variety of businesses in Edmonton and Calgary, we’re here to provide transparent, easy-to-understand and utilize solutions that will have your team ready to face whatever challenges the digital sphere has in store for you.
Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you get ready to face the digital world with confidence!