The days are long gone when sufficient cybersecurity meant simply installing firewalls and antivirus software. Cybercrime is on the rise, and experts estimate that the annual costs associated with it will reach $10.5 trillion worldwide by 2025. Organizations of all kinds are at risk for cyberattacks and should proceed accordingly to protect their sensitive information.
However, cybercriminals are only the start, as not every data security risk your organization faces will come from outsiders.
Information security can be complex and overwhelming, especially in today’s rapidly evolving threat landscape. The best protection against security risks is understanding how every employee has a role to play in protecting information assets. Read on to learn more about the ways your organization could be at risk and the best practices you should adopt to secure your data.
Contrary to popular belief, most insider threats to organizational data are not bitter former (or soon-to-be-former) employees, but rather well-meaning staff who put data at risk through mistakes or negligence. The 2022 Cost of Insider Threats Global Report found that negligent employees were the root cause of 56% of cybersecurity incidents experienced by survey respondents. Human error, not malicious intent, was responsible for the majority of insider incidents covered in the report.
A good employee education program is key to reducing mistakes that could lead to data breaches. Security awareness training that is both engaging and relevant can help to expose common mistakes and allow employees to adapt security best practices into their working routines.
Soon-to-be former employees pose their own set of risks. Between the ongoing resignation trend and layoffs associated with current economic uncertainty, it’s safe to say that employee churn is still high. This is more than a staffing and resource issue—it can also affect the security of your information. When employees leave, they may want to take your information with them. According to recent data, 53% of employees believe that because they worked on a document, it belongs to them. So, malicious or not, employees who leave may exit with confidential documents in (virtual) hand.
To combat this risk, organizations need to ensure that their internal policies cover the rules around company data and that these are clearly understood by all employees. Being fully aware that they are in breach of company policies should deter employees serving their notice from taking documents with them in most cases.
Remote and hybrid work are here to stay. According to data from the Pew Research Center, before the onset of COVID-19, approximately 23% of individuals who were able to do their jobs remotely worked from home all or most of the time. In early 2022, that number had grown dramatically to 59%.
Although remote and hybrid working offer numerous advantages, they also bring risk. Many cybercriminals are targeting remote workers since home networks and personal devices are typically not as fully protected as ones in the office. Criminals also expect remote workers to have their guard down at home and take advantage of this by targeting remote employees with social engineering attacks like phishing.
Ensure remote workers complete security awareness training that will teach them to keep their guard up and avoid falling victim to the social engineering techniques used by bad actors to gain access to user credentials.
Not every legal organization has its own dedicated IT team. When they do have dedicated IT support, they are often focused on the routine maintenance of on-premises technology. Organizations of all kinds are constantly under threat, with the average seeing 497 cyberattacks every week. Software patching is one part of cybersecurity hygiene that helps reduce an organization’s attack surface, but manually installing and distributing these updates is a big job for a small IT team.
Moving your document management to the cloud improves security while limiting the IT burden. With cloud solutions, most vendors offer unlimited updates throughout the license period. This eliminates the need for manual patching and ensures your technology always has the latest security updates.
The greater security offered in the cloud goes beyond automatic patching. Contrary to what some believe, document management in the cloud is far safer than on-premises.
Modern enterprise cloud is fortified with such an array of cutting-edge defense mechanisms and incorporates such deep, layered security best practices that one of the most common reasons legal organizations share for their decision to migrate their data to the cloud is to reduce their risk exposure.
With infrastructures monitored 24/7/365 by expert, dedicated security teams, best-of- breed network and security tools as standard, and a battalion of sophisticated algorithms continuously examining and guarding data at every layer, no on- premises server network can offer the same degree of protection. Even if they could, the cost would be astronomical.
Furthermore, good cloud technology is built using Zero Trust architecture. Zero Trust is exactly as it sounds: security based on the need to verify every interaction – and nothing that isn’t verified can be trusted. An individual’s ability to access specific data, move around within the system, and view or modify data with differing permission levels relies on the ability of Zero Trust security checkpoints to validate that the specific user and the device they are using have the appropriate credentials to proceed.
Breaches happen for many reasons, including gaps in security infrastructure, willful or accidental actions by individuals, and incursions by external bad actors. Although migration to the cloud is an important step toward safeguarding your data, ultimately, your organization must develop a culture of security to benefit from the move fully. After all, people, both intentionally and unintentionally, are the weakest link of any security system. Clear protocols and good training paired with the right cloud technology are your best bet for keeping your organization’s data safe.
Back to all articles Company Product Name Filevine Latest Developments and Upcoming Updates Recently unveiled Payments by Filevine is a potent in-house
Back to all articles Company Product Name TimeSolv by profitsolv Latest Developments and Upcoming Updates New reports based on the Logi
Back to all articles Company Product Name CoCounsel CoCounsel Drafting Latest Developments and Upcoming Updates Single point of access to CoCounsel
Back to all articles Company Product Name Filevine Latest Developments and Upcoming Updates New and evolving AI (artificial intelligence) tools will
