Cybersecurity and the ISO standard: how safe is your data at Adsolut?
November 2023 - If you invest in software, you (rightly) set high standards for performance, user-friendliness and versatility. But before buying, do you ever consider the security of your data? Cyber attacks and data breaches can cause a lot of (financial) damage - just check the newspapers. Moreover, when confidential business information about customers falls into the wrong hands, it almost always leads to a breach of trust. Customers feel short-changed and drop out.
Cybercriminals target big and small
In other words, cybersecurity belongs at the top of your priority list. Yes, small businesses are also at risk. Indeed, they are more often targeted by cybercriminals today precisely because their precautions often leave much to be desired.
Possible measures to reduce the risks are:
· Taking backups of your data
It is important to have at least two backups - i.e. three copies of your data. To ensure that you still have at least one backup copy in extreme situations, such as natural disasters, it is best to keep the backups in two isolated locations, geographically far enough apart.
· Store data encrypted
To mitigate the risk of ransomware or other cyber attacks, it is important that backups are stored encrypted, access to the backups is secured, and that access is only granted to a limited number of authorised people.
· Implementing a Disaster Recovery Plan
Backups are ideally part of a so-called Disaster Recovery plan (DR plan). This sets some thresholds in case of an incident, such as the maximum downtime of the IT system and the maximum amount of data loss tolerated. It also includes a strategy for getting the affected system or applications back up and running as soon as possible in the event of an incident.
DR plans should be tested and updated on a regular basis to ensure continued recovery according to the imposed criteria.
What about business-sensitive cloud data?
But that is not all. A large proportion of your business data is stored in the cloud with your software vendors and system administrators. A data breach there and your customer data and other confidential data are up for grabs.
So you better partner with a software vendor that takes cybersecurity seriously. How exactly can you find out? The international standard ISO/IEC 27001 was created for that purpose. Software vendors with this label comply with the strictest data and cybersecurity measures in the world.
Does this mean your data is 100 per cent secure? Unfortunately not, but it does help you keep all risks under optimal control.
