Encryption helps keep prying eyes away from your sensitive data.
As mentioned in our previous article, encryption is a form of security that is gaining more of a foothold in terms of a standard business practice.
Keeping your data and information secure is a top priority and encryption provides that extra robust protection needed to keep hackers from viewing your information.
Essentially, encryption works by encoding documents to make them unreadable without a specific key. Whether you choose symmetric encryption (which requires one key to both encrypt and decrypt a file) or asymmetric encryption (which requires two keys; one to encrypt and one to decrypt a file), users who do not have access to the key will be unable to read the file.
Case in point, encryption is such a powerful and effective tool that ransomware viruses are based on hackers encrypting your data which they will only release after paying a ransom.
While employing encryption in your office is a good idea, you need to create parameters around what gets encrypted. Simply encrypting everything within your organization is too broad and may cause problems with different users trying to access different data.
Areas Where Encryption Works Best
Certain areas of business benefit well from encryption. On average, these areas carry a lot of sensitive data that require increased resources to protect it:
Due to the constant sending and receiving of email, encrypting email messages ensures that the content is only read by the intended recipient.
Email is a common point of entry for hackers to gain access and send viruses and spam to users.
By enabling encryption, when you are sending sensitive information through email, helps ensure that even if the document is intercepted by hackers, they will not be able to open it.
Mobile Devices
Encrypting your mobile devices is another way you can prevent data from leaving your organization unprotected. Employees tend to use their mobile devices to work, send and receive email, view documents, etc.
As a result, protections need to be taken into consideration and put in place.
USB Drives
USB drives are also a good place to install encryption. Due to their portable nature, if they were ever lost or stolen and contained valuable information, anyone who found the drive would not be able to read what is on it.
Servers
This takes encryption to a slightly larger scale. On the server side, encrypting the hard drives will ensure that that your firm’s most sensitive data stays protected from hackers.
However it is important to note that email, mobile devices, and Internet browsers are points of weakness where hackers can gain access to your server environment regardless of whether it is encrypted. By employing encryption in these areas as well you reduce the risk of infection.
SecurITy Tip:
Delve into the areas of your business that you feel would benefit the most from encryption. Whether that refers to the portable areas of your business such as email and mobile devices or your overall infrastructure (i.e. hard drives, servers, etc.) Having that additional protection creates a more difficult environment for hackers to exploit and gain hold of your information.
Interested in learning more about encryption and how to enable it within your environment? Triella provides solutions on managing your mobile devices and other security measures like two-factor authentication into your environment. Give us a call at 647-426-1004.
Courtney Rosebush is a Marketing and Sales Coordinator at Triella, a technology consulting firm specializing in providing technology audits, planning advice, project management and other CIO-related services to small and medium sized firms. Courtney can be reached at 647.426.1004 x 227. For additional articles, go to www.triella.com/publications. Triella is a VMware Professional Partner, Microsoft Certified Partner, Citrix Solution Advisor – Silver, Dell Preferred Partner, Authorized Worldox Reseller and a Kaspersky Reseller.
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