One of the most important things each of your employees own is their password. After all, this seemingly ordinary string of characters is one of the measures that can keep unscrupulous individuals away from your company’s confidential information. However, as a business owner, you may be alarmed to know that the prevalence of cyber attacks continues to go up every year, especially if you are storing all of your sensitive data on the cloud. While you can invest in a service that provides cloud-based security solutions in order to protect all of your most important files, it can be all for naught if one of your employees allows a stranger access to everything in your system.
The Surprising Ease with Which Your Company Could be Hacked
Despite all of the advice circulating around the web for about a decade or more, many people still seem to prefer living on the edge by choosing passwords that are hardly passwords at all. However, if you implement good practices that will allow your employees to protect their individual accounts in each department of your company, then you’ll lessen your chances of becoming another target of a data breach.
Do Not Base Your Passwords onDictionaryWords
Think of it this way: the Oxford dictionary only has less than 200,000 words within its pages. Out of those thousands of words, most people only regularly use about a fifth of them during daily conversations and work-related tasks. That’s not a lot at all by a hacker’s standard. Conversely, consider that a complicated and strong password could take years for a computer to finally crack.
Make Your Password as Complicated as Possible
Because words are too easy to guess, most online platforms advise users to mix up letters, numbers, and symbols within their passwords in order to make them harder to guess. Don’t forget about character length, either, as it is a factor that greatly increases your password’s strength.
Do Not Share Accounts or Passwords with One Another
Handing over your password to anyone else is like giving away the key to your house. No matter how much your employees may trust each other, it’s always better to be safe than sorry. If you’re using one account for everybody, remember: it takes just one dishonest individual to give in to temptation and run off with your confidential data in the blink of an eye.
While you may find it difficult at first to get all of your employees to comply with these regulations, if you play your cards right, you will be able to get everybody on board with your plan. As long as you are able to explain in detail why their role in protecting the company’s data is so important, and how they can make a difference with small changes to their daily habits, then your business should become impenetrable to most, if not all cyber attacks that may come your way. The sooner you implement these, the better, so why wait? Get started now.
