Ensuring secure employee and customer experiences is essential in today’s digital world. With the increasing prevalence of data breaches and cyberattacks, it is important to ensure that customer and employee data remains safe.

Estimates show that 679,000 DDoS attacks occur monthly, which results in a total of 16 DDoS attacks every minute. Companies must take measures to protect their employees and customers’ personal information from malicious actors. 

This includes implementing strong security protocols, such as multi-factor authentication, encryption, and regular security scans. Additionally, companies should ensure that employees are properly trained on the importance of cybersecurity and how to respond if they suspect a breach or attack has occurred. By taking these actionable steps, companies can make sure that both their employees and customers have secure experiences with their organization.

In this blog post, we share six ways to help you achieve this and protect your company and your reputation.

1. Have a solid IAM strategy in place

The management of digital identities and access to resources is referred to as identity and access management, or IAM for short. Components of IAM include authentication, authorization, and account provisioning. To ensure that only authorized users have access to specific resources, you can create different identity types, such as employee, customer, or vendor.

Partnering with a reputable IAM solutions provider, such as Ping Identity, is critical for ensuring secure employee and customer experiences and realizing your full IAM potential. Moreover, you’ll know that your systems are protected from bad actors, giving you peace of mind.

2. Encrypt Social Media Accounts

Your company’s reputation is shaped by social media. Some companies rely more on social media than their websites because this is the place where customers can interact with them and expect excellent customer service.

It is therefore important to use encryption for certain fields, such as user names and passwords. They can only be opened by an access token or hashed key that represents the username and password of these accounts. This prevents data from being compromised.

The access token may be changed or revoked if there is a security breach. This can all be done without compromising your actual password and/or user name.

3. Back-Up Data

Cybercriminals frequently target companies with ransomware. In such situations, the bad actors hack into a system and block your employees from accessing it. Companies are often asked to pay ransoms of thousands of dollars or more to regain access and prevent the leakage of sensitive information about their customers.

Backups don’t solve the problem of data leakage, but they can buy time for companies to fix it. The data backups must be stored securely and in a different location. This will help protect both employees’ and customers’ information, even if there is a breach of your network.

4. Use Employee ID Cards

Each employee with access to company computers or the network should be issued an ID card that includes their photo and name. It’s an easy but effective method of identifying employees. This is useful if the company needs to investigate an incident of cyber-security. The ID card must be linked to a database that records the last time an employee was seen or if they logged in using a particular computer.

5. Tell Employees About Their Role in Staying Safe

Let your employees know that security isn’t just for the IT department and that everyone plays an important role in keeping the company secure.

As with any training program for safety, ensure that employees are aware of the risks and know how to stay safe. As an example, make sure that everyone knows the importance of using strong and unique passwords, not clicking links or opening mail they do not know or trust, and reporting suspicious or unusual activities to security. Make sure to have this information available in a location that is easily accessible.

Include information on what to do in the event of a breach. What information should employees report? How should they report the breach? Should they use email, phone, etc.? Your security team must also be available to employees for questions about their role in preventing breaches. This will reinforce the message and show that management takes the issue seriously.

6. Update All Plug-Ins & Software

Even the most powerful and sophisticated software solutions require the most recent updates to function properly. So you need to make sure that your firewalls, cybersecurity tools, and plugins are all updated regularly.

Failure to update these tools regularly can create a loophole or vulnerability that can be easily exploited by bad actors. By regularly scanning for updates and enabling them, you can close these loopholes before they expose your company to serious risk.

Final Thoughts

To deliver secure employee and customer experiences, companies must learn about potential dangers and where they lie. This way, they can minimize the risk before something turns into a full-blown breach. With the tips above, you can avoid costly legal, regulatory, and economic consequences and make sure your employees and customers can trust you.