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Compliance Consultants Chicago: Increasing Organizational Internet Security Awareness in Chicago

By: The Principals at Compliance & Competition Consultants, LLC

In response to constantly changing and evolving online security threats, more and more businesses are reviewing Compliance Programs and taking time conducting a thorough internet security risk assessments. Though some threats on the Internet are facilitated by exploiting errors in software and code, there are countless mistakes that an employee can make that would aid an attacker with malicious intent. Failing to be diligent by creating adequate security measures could leave your business vulnerable to steep fines and unwanted liability concerns. You need to do everything in your power to ensure that employees adhere to a security policy. The following are some tips to help you increase security compliance awareness in your organization.

Risk Assessment

The very first thing you need to do is to assess your risks. You need to understand where potential security breaches could occur, quantify how damaging they could be to your business, and gauge the likelihood of an attack before moving forward.

Follow Trends and Constantly Update Your Policy

Data security demands that you keep adapting to the latest and greatest threats. For your corporate compliance plan to be successful, you will need to constantly, diligently update your security policies by staying on the bleeding edge of technology.

Employee Training

If you don’t inform and train your employees about the latest security challenges, your employees won’t know how to take actions to avoid a security breach. This could be disastrous for the well-being of your business. Not only do your employees need to know about potential risks and how to avoid them, but they also need to be very aware of the consequences and liability concerns if they fail to properly address a compliance issue.

Educate Employees about Off-site Risks

If your employees do any amount of work off-site, they can still create compliance problems. It is becoming increasingly more common to access work-related data from anywhere an employee has an internet connection due to mobile technologies and the migration to the cloud. You must inform your employees about off-site risks as well.

Explain Compliance Failure Scenarios

In order to enforce your policies, you need to have some sort of consequences in place for failing to adhere to corporate compliance policies. You need to make sure that your employees are responsible and accountable, and an employee’s failure to meet compliance standards needs to be dealt with accordingly.

Incorporate Corporate Policies into Your Security Plan

You need to create corporate-wide policies that define steps that need to be taken to adhere with security regulations. It is extremely important to develop your policies and best practices based on the unique requirements of different departments of your organization. Security concerns that you should incorporate into your corporate compliance strategy include:

  • Password complexity requirements
  • Regularly updating passwords
  • Data encryption standards such as VPNs and other security software
  • Physical security
  • Best practices for backing up data
  • Acceptable use policy
  • Proper disposal of sensitive data
  • E-mail filters

The need for security compliance is rising every day, and failing to implement solutions to these concerns could leave you vulnerable to an attack. For a no cost consultation for your business contact Chicago Compliance Consultants today.