Data breaches are happening every single day, are you prepared? Some might stick out, like the Yahoo compromise in August of 2013. However, these can have a considerable impact on your company and your clientele’s trust in you.
MyRepublic Data Breach
MyRepublic recently reported that approximately 80,000 of its mobile subscribers in Singapore had their data compromised. They were obviously not prepared for a data breach. The data breach happened on a third-party data storage platform that contained user data. Are you leaving yourself or your company prone to an attack?
We do not know much about the breach that occurred with MyRepublic. They could not report if it was a cloud-based service or even how they discovered the information breach. While we might still be questioning how, why, and possibly even who, we need to make sure that we are not the next MyRepublic.
Are You Secure?
While the cloud can be a fantastic tool to implement into your company’s day-to-day life, have you ever asked them what the security protocols are? For example, are you the only one being hosted on the server? Do you have the proper protection if it is a shared device? We need to ask these questions to ensure that you and your clientele are protected. Asking these questions ensures you are prepared for a data breach in the best way: by not having one.
Do you have Zero Trust?
Furthermore, having a “Zero Trust” philosophy to the data you possess can significantly reduce the number of breaches you can experience. While zero trust is a philosophy and not something that you can install, there are steps that you can take to achieve this.
Zero Trust is the philosophy of trusting nothing, including the people inside your network. Think of your network like a country club. Everyone needs to have a membership to access information. Even if you have been a country club member for 30 years, you still need to prove that you belong. The same principle applies to your network.
In essence, in order to be truly prepared for a data breach we need to use the preceptive words that Suzanne Massie said to Ronald Reagan “Trust but verify.”
Do you know where your hard drives go at night?
Matthew Bradford has been in the IT industry for over 25 years serving in Fortune 500 companies and smaller enterprises alike. He is currently the VP of Architecture and Development for TechR2, the premiere IT Data End of Life Management Company.
