Why Data Encryption Should Be a Top Priority for Businesses in 2021

Today, most businesses are storing their sensitive data in the cloud. While this is an excellent move, it also puts your data at risk of getting into the wrong hands. For this reason, businesses and organizations are turning to encryption to enhance their data security plans.

Whether you have been using encryption in your organization for some time now or are planning to do it, incorporating encryption in your cloud storage is necessary. It can be end-to-end encryption, runtime encryption, or any other encryption solution that ensures that your data is well-protected.

Here we look at the importance of encryption for businesses and what businesses can do to avoid many threats from cyber attackers. But before that,

How Does Encryption Work?

In simple terms, encryption works by scrambling information to make it unreadable to a person who does not have a decoding key. Data scrambling was first introduced during World War II, where data scrambling was done manually.

Encryption works the same way but with the use of algorithms. Once you encrypt your data, anyone without a decryption key will not access it. That will make it hard even for hackers to read your data even if they access it.

Of course, they can use sophisticated software to try and figure out the encryption key, but that will require weeks, if not months. Most cyber attackers will not be willing to spend such an amount of time trying to guess your encryption key. The stronger your algorithm key is, the harder it will be to crack the code.

Why is Encryption Necessary for Any Organization?

A report released by IBM in 2018 shows that, on average, a data breach costs businesses about $3.86 million. Too much, right? That’s how much it will cost your business if you don’t take the right data safety measures.

To avoid such data breach incidents in your organization, it is imperative to protect your data through encryption. Below are some areas where encryption will benefit your business:

Protect Your Sensitive Information When Sending or Receiving Emails

If you’re like most businesses, you receive over a hundred emails a day. Most of these emails contain critical information regarding your company and how it operates. Most companies derive a strong password policy to protect their emails from the wrong people. Although this is good, sometimes you need an extra layer to protect your business if hackers manage to access your emails. This is where encryption comes into play.

Find a full email solution that will protect your messages and connection. It can be Microsoft Outlook or reliable email encryption third-party software that works with all email types. In this case, your recipient will need to have a key to decrypt the files.

Protect Your Hard Drive

Setting a password for your company’s computers is an excellent way to protect your hard drive and the data on it. But have you thought about what would happen to your data if someone stole your computer, pulled out the hard drive, and plugged it into another computer that is not protected by a password? That’s why you should encrypt your hard drive as well.

Popular operating systems like Apple OS X and Microsoft Windows have an encryption system called FileVault and BitLocker, respectively. Ask your security team to install any of this to protect your data if someone gets access to your hard drive.

Protect Your Data on the Cloud and Internet

As you’ve seen, encrypting your hard drive will protect your data from hackers who manage to steal your computer. But what happens to the hackers who target your internet traffic or data stored in your cloud?

Thanks to COVID-19, most companies are today run remotely. That means your internet traffic and data stored on the cloud are more vulnerable to attackers. The best thing is that encryption solutions will protect your data in such cases too.

Encryption allows you to protect your cloud data (whether stored or in transit). On the other hand, protect your internet traffic by setting up a VPN for your business. Ideally, all data moving through a VPN is encrypted.

Other reasons why it’s imperative to encrypt your data include:

• Prevent hackers from using your customer’s information to redirect payments to different accounts.
• Cybercriminals can use your vendor details to place orders that your company would be required to pay.

As you can see, there are endless reasons why you need data encryption in your organization. Talk to data security experts about the best encryption solution for your company to reduce the chances of becoming a data breach victim.