A company’s most precious assets are not physical goods, cash, or equipment; they are data and information. From customer records to intellectual property to confidential communications, digital assets drive your entire operation. Protecting those digital assets has become a paramount security concern.
Take Asset Inventory
You cannot protect what you don’t understand. Conduct a full inventory and classification of all your digital assets. Identify data owners, access permissions, regulatory requirements, and protection needs.
Safeguard Customer Data
One of your most critical digital assets is customer data, like personal records, payment info and transaction histories. Strict security controls, data encryption, and access limitations are required to safeguard this sensitive data and comply with data privacy regulations.
Secure Intellectual Property
Your company’s patents, source code, product designs, trade secrets, and other proprietary information are extremely lucrative for cyber criminals and corporate spies. Air-gapped storage, strict access controls, redaction, and digital rights management tools protect IP assets.
Control Privileged Access
Insider threats, both malicious and accidental, put digital assets at enormous risk. Privileged access management solutions limit admin rights to only those employees requiring elevated privileges. Activity is tightly monitored, access reviewed periodically, and credentials vaulted.
Implement Application Protection
From web apps and mobile apps to legacy systems and cloud-native apps, vulnerabilities within applications offer gaping holes for cyberattacks. The experts at Hillstone Networks say that application firewalls, vulnerability scanning, application whitelisting, and runtime application protection defend apps.
Utilize Data Loss Prevention
A single data breach could devastate your business. Data loss prevention (DLP) tools automatically monitor, detect, and protect against sensitive data leaks across networks, endpoints, applications and the cloud. DLP blocks, redacts, and encrypts confidential data flows.
Encrypt Sensitive Data
Strong data encryption makes digital assets unreadable and worthless if intercepted by hackers. Industry-standard encryption algorithms like AES-256 render information unintelligible without the proper encryption keys. Both data-at-rest and data-in-motion should be encrypted.
Enable Multi-Factor Authentication
Relying solely on passwords to access critical digital assets is extremely risky in this age of credential theft and brute-forcing. Multi-factor authentication combining something you know (passwords) with something you possess (mobile app, security key, etc.) provides much stronger identity assurance.
Compartmentalize Network Access
Rather than giving every user and device full network access, implement zero trust segmentation to divide systems/assets into secure compartments. Rigorous multi-factor authentication and least privilege access principles control lateral movement between segments.
Monitor for Insider Risks
Rogue employees, contractor risks, and careless mistakes pose serious insider threats to high-value digital assets. Deploy user behavior analytics and monitoring to detect abnormal data access patterns, policy violations, and other indicators of insider misuse.
Have an Incident Response Plan
Despite your best defenses, no organization is immune to security incidents or breaches compromising digital assets. Having a pre-planned, well-rehearsed incident response process minimizes damages, preserves evidence, and rapidly restores normal business operations.
Provide Security Awareness Training
Your employees are both a potential digital asset risk and a strong last line of defense. Mandating continuous security awareness training educates staff on cyber threats, security best practices, compliance obligations, and their role in protecting digital assets.
Consider Cyber Insurance
While cyber insurance cannot prevent digital asset breaches, it helps offset devastating financial effects of cybercrime, business interruption costs, legal liabilities, remediation fees, and more. Talk to an insurance broker about policy options aligned to your unique risks.
Conclusion
In our information economy, digital assets have become the lifeblood and differentiator for most companies. Intellectual property, customer data, operations data, apps, and communications make your business competitively viable. Protecting those invaluable digital assets from misuse, theft, or destruction is no longer optional, it is an existential necessity.
