How To Know That Your Network And Computers Are Truly Secure

Data security is a major component of maintaining a large online presence in the form of a network, servers or a fairly big and information rich website (especially a website that’s loaded with sensitive, confidential information).

This necessary focus is a direct result of the ever expanding number of threats that exist to all our digitized data, and these threats grow in danger as more and more of what we hold valuable becomes part of our IT infrastructure instead of remaining as physical material in the form of paper files and written information.

As a result, if you have a company that’s working heavily on the internet or through digital systems or your organization is mostly digital, especially when it comes to its data; you need to be aware of all potential threats and have a security policy in place to account for them as much as reasonably possible.

These security procedures will include many different things, each tailored to the type of danger it’s protecting against. Let’s go over a number of the most important ones now and develop a plan for being sure that your networks, computers, websites and data remain secure.

Protecting Against Intrusion and Destructive Hacking

One of the principal dangers that your network and computers will face comes in the form of hack attacks from malicious code, human intruders and data mining programs. There are millions of these travelling around the internet and they represent a wide variety of assorted threats that can range from simple but very costly data theft to wholescale destruction and erasure of valuable information and systems.

Naturally then, protection against such diverse threats is also going to be quite varied and involve a number of different procedures; all of which should be implemented so that they overlap and give you redundant security where possible.

Security Audits and Penetration Tests

As a first step in keeping your digitally connected data secure, you need to discover exactly where all your potential leaks and weakness are located. By finding them for yourself before the bad guys do, you can patch them in advance and maintain a more rigorous security infrastructure against real attacks.

Your best friend will be to run through a series of security audits that include penetration testing, internal security testing and a post examination consultation that covers what’s been discovered and what can be reinforced.

In essence these security tests first attempt to simulate an external attack on your networks and machines, trying to find clandestine entry points through accidental vulnerabilities that you haven’t covered up, this process is called a penetration test.

Then, they can also follow this pen test up with internal security checks that look for internal weaknesses in your data and access management, making sure that all information is kept encrypted, access points are well restricted and that no employees or programs are creating weak spots due to bad administration.

By going through this process, especially with a professional provider such as LWG Consulting, that has plenty of referenced experience in the security industry, you can then learn how to implement superior protective measures.

Furthermore, though the process may cost a certain amount of money and time to complete, the preemptive value of a controlled security attack through auditing is far less costly than the consequences of actually being hacked when you don’t at all expect it.

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Implementing Stronger Intrusion Protection

Once you’ve thoroughly audited your system, you can more strategically proceed to place protective barriers in the places where it was show to be lacking. These can vary enormously depending on what you’re trying to protect and how your network is structured but there are a few essentials that will almost certainly be required.

For one thing, make sure that you have at least one and preferably several digital security people working for you either as direct staff members or as hired third party service providers. These individuals should be responsible for monitoring and updating all the sensitive systems that could be a potential hack points.

Furthermore, your security protocol should at a minimum include the installation and constant maintenance of both external and internal firewalls, which can come in the form of software or physical hardware setups, and the installation of network monitoring software. Additional protections should also include a strong antivirus package for all of your computers, your website hosting servers and your overall network itself.

Finally, network intrusion systems should be kept in place and monitored regularly to catch any malicious scripts or suspicious activity that might be occurring either at the periphery of your digital systems or right inside your computers themselves.

Stored Data Protection

Now that we’ve covered the key points around keeping your systems safe from intruders, we need to go over how your actual data itself can also be kept secure from all possible threats; hackers are not the only danger against information, and events such as fires, failed hardware and accidental information wipes can also lead to massive amounts of crucial information being lost.

Remote Backup

This is a fundamental starting point in keeping your information safe. All of your server data and the information stored on computers inside your network should be kept safe 24 hours a day through automated remote backups that occur at frequently and regularly scheduled intervals.

This can be set up through specialized software that either sends information into a remote cloud storage medium (your most secure option against physical disasters) or a series of external storage devices of your own (more secure in terms of privacy).

Either or both data protection options should be performed frequently to make sure that what’s protected is always up to date and both data protection options should also involve encryption of your information within its external storage medium, thus guaranteeing maximum privacy for sensitive knowledge.

A Note on Forensic Data Recovery

Any information that isn’t backed up with preventative measures can easily fall victim to destruction through physical hardware failures or disasters at the point of storage –fires, floods, etc. While this is a terrible outcome that’s going to be unavoidably costly, there is still a data recovery solution, which can be used for information that was never remotely saved.

This procedure is costly and time consuming, especially in the case of physical corruption of storage systems like server disks and hard drives, but in the vast majority of cases it leads to recovery of as much as 100% of all information that’s seemingly been lost to what looked like a truly catastrophic corruption of your drives.

  Stephan Jukic

About the Author:

Stephan Jukic is a freelance writer who generally covers a variety of subjects relating to the latest changes in white hat SEO, mobile technology, marketing tech and digital security. He also loves to read and write about location-free business, portable business management and finance. Connect with Stephan on LinkedIn.