Network security is a problem with many companies IT infrastructure. This problem has led to the theft of client information, trade secrets and even put companies out of business. This is because most people within a company that are responsible in making the IT decision making process actually do not even know what they are deciding on. It is this lack of education that has provoked me to write this article. Threats to a network come from many places. They can come from internal within the staff, external through email, external through the internet and office theft.
The staff within a company should be held to an iron clad computer usage policy. Most companies we visit have no usage policy in place. This is a very inexpensive first line of defense and a neccessity if the need to terminate an individual over their computer violations. You can download a sample computer usage policy by clicking here and tayloring it to your needs.
Email is another important consideration. Do not open emails from people you do now know. Be sure to utilize an email scanner that will scan your emails for viruses. We have so many times that people open up any email that comes across their inbox and causes them to sustain costly service calls to clean up the infected computers. So, through end user education we can help aleviate some of the issues caused by email use and it’s security implications.
Freedom to surf the internet is a big problem as well. A lot of companies have no type of internet content filtering within their organization. Employee’s are free to surf the internet wherever they choose with no type of monitoring resulting in lost time and money in productivity as well as exposure to internet threats and potentially great legal liabilities.
Office theft internal or external is a problem. Companies need to protect their valuable data and when people are using the computers in their business they have to have access to important documents in order to perform their job. However, this access to information can be detrminental if the person downloads sensitive documents to a USB drive, email’s client lists to a competitor and many other scenarios.
Contact our office to schedule a free security assesment of your network where we will provide you with information that will help you get a proper computer usage policy in place, an email protection plan, a content filtering solution as well as a computer network monitoring solution to allow you comprehensive reports of what your staff is doing and trends of how they are spending their time when using company resources. Please email [email protected] or call 863-802-9675 to schedule your security assesment today.
