How To Protect Your Organization’s Digital Footprint

July 12, 2024 No Comments

By Sloane Callahan

The internet has helped advance the modern business world to greater heights. Thanks to its convenience and numerous benefits, people across the globe have become so reliant on the digital world. 

As the use of digital platforms increases in time, businesses of all sizes should start thinking about their digital footprint. The growing reliance on digital tools and platforms also opens your business to cybersecurity threats. 

This article dives deeper into understanding your organization’s digital footprint and several tips and strategies for protecting it—from investing in technologies like corporate anti virus to scheduling regular employee training. 

Understanding Corporate Digital Footprint

Your corporate digital footprint consists of everything your company does online. This includes all your online activities, communications, transactions, marketing, and networking as well as those of your extended business partners such as your suppliers or vendors. 

In addition, the cloud has made digital footprints more complicated in recent years. As companies rely on infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, and software as a service for mission-critical operations, their digital footprints have also expanded, making them more difficult to define or secure. 

Fortunately, managing and securing any digital footprint is possible. Businesses simply need to know how to get started. 

4 Tips To Secure Your Organization’s Digital Footprint

1. Determine Your Digital Assets

To fully protect and secure your business’s digital footprint, you should first know what your digital footprint entails. After all, you can’t protect your digital footprint if you don’t know what it is. 

You should do an inventory of all electronic and online assets. When listing down your digital assets related to your corporate digital footprint, you should classify them into either of the two:

– Physical Assets: These include your office workstations, IT infrastructure, servers, and other physical devices used by your employees, even mobile devices, including phones. 

– Digital Assets: These include your social accounts, email accounts, IP address and websites, billing records, bank accounts, and more. 

You can also use this list to draw data flow diagrams, which can help you identify vulnerabilities for protection and remediation.

2. Take Advantage Of Technology

Just like how you leverage technology to streamline your business operations and expand your digital footprint, you should also use specialized technology to manage your digital security. 

In general, there’s a plethora of security tools out there from antivirus software and VPNs to specialized security management tools that can optimize your cybersecurity initiatives. These tools can help your IT teams keep your business’s digital footprint and assets safe and well-protected. You can also utilize a digital footprint checker.

Some advanced tools even offer dynamic and data-driven measurements of your company’s security posture, providing you with the necessary information to make well-informed decisions. 

3. Be Careful With Social Media

The primary marketing tools for businesses at present are social media. However, similar to other digital platform, they are notorious for collecting information and data and prone to cyberattacks and hacking. 

In fact, almost 30 attempts to take over business social networking accounts occur every year for each organization. That’s roughly three attempts per month. Should an attempt be successful, it can damage businesses that rely substantially on social platforms for marketing, building their brand, and connecting with customers. 

While you don’t have to stop using social media for marketing, you need to be very careful in how you use them. Having a strong privacy setting on social sites is critical. You need to have better control over your corporate social pages’ privacy settings. Take extra precautions such as setting up multi-factor authentication to prevent anyone from compromising your social accounts.

4. Invest In Security Awareness Training

Did you know that your biggest security risk is your employees? In fact, statistics revealed that over 80% of security breaches are caused by untrained employees. All it takes is a few seconds to misjudge an email and malware can enter your business’s endpoints, wreaking havoc on your digital footprint. 

As the world continues to evolve and rely on digital assets, it’s important to make sure that your employees can keep up not only in managing your company’s digital footprint but also protecting it and other assets. 

A solid cybersecurity training program can educate your employees about corporate policies and procedures when working with your digital assets and critical data. It can also train them to determine potential threats and how to handle them. 

Takeaway

In this dynamic digital world, managing and protecting your business’s digital footprint should be a priority, as it impacts your company’s overall growth and survival. If you are unsure on how to go about it, the tips discussed above can help you get started in securing your company’s valuable digital footprint from the increasingly sophisticated risks of the digital realm. 

About the Author

For 14 years now, Sloane Callahan has been a cloud specialist. She loves how each day is different in her job. She also writes guest posts and blog articles to help businesses and individuals alike cope up with the ever-changing digital world. Her hobbies include playing the cello and arranging flowers.