10 Ways To Protect Your Company From A Data Breach

A Tragic History Of Data Breaches

We have suffered from high profile data breaches at many big-name retailers, hundreds of millions of consumers have had their credit and debit cards compromised, not to mention other personal information. 

The consequences of suffering data breaches caused major brand damage and range from consumer mistrust, a drop in traffic, and a decrease in sales. 

Cybercriminals are getting increasingly sophisticated, with no end in sight. 

They are getting so sophisticated that retailers, retail standards organizations, audit committees, and retail organizational boards are testifying before Congress and implementing strategies that will protect them from the next costly data breach. 

Since 2014, data security and the enforcement of security controls has become a top priority.

10 Ways That You Can Prevent a Data Breach

Here are 10 ways you can more easily achieve that goal while maintaining required PCI compliance. 

1. Minimize the customer data you collect and store. Acquire and keep only the data required for legitimate business purposes, and only for as long as necessary. 
2. Manage the costs and administrative burden of the PCI compliance validation process. Try segmenting your infrastructure among multiple teams to minimize the complexity associated with the applicable compliance metrics. 
3. Maintain PCI compliance throughout the checkout process to guard data against all the possible points of compromise. 
4. Develop a strategy to protect your infrastructure on multiple levels. This includes closing every opportunity for cybercriminals to exploit your POS terminals, kiosks, workstations, and servers. 
5. Maintain real-time inventory and actionable intelligence on all endpoints and servers and control the overall security of your infrastructure to maintain PCI compliance. Employ multiple layers of security technology to stymie sophisticated hackers. 
6. Extend the life of your systems and keep them compliant. 
7. Use real-time sensors to test your security system regularly. 
8. Build measurable business intelligence around your business assets. 
9. Conduct regular audits of security measures, especially connections commonly used as gateways for attacks. 
10. Educate employees about their role in data security, inform all employees of the potential threats to customer data, and the legal requirements for securing it. This should include designating an employee to serve as an Information Security coordinator.

Security Awareness Training Can Prevent A Data Breach

Did you know that 93.8% of data breaches are caused by human error?

The good news is that this symptom of a data breach can be very preventable.

There are several courses out there but not many courses are easy to digest.

Click the link below to learn about the easiest way to teach your business how to be cyber-safe:
Click Here To Check Out Our Cyber Security Awareness Training Page