Since 1993, email has been revolutionizing the way we communicate in our business and personal lives. As businesses continuously rely on the convenience and dependability of email communication, these networks become vulnerable to a variety of issues. Viruses, malware and data breaches are only a few of the serious risks that could leave your business defenseless against a financial, reputational or functional disaster.
Email security is a pertinent area that businesses must address in order to reinforce protection against malicious threats. Learn how to safeguard your business’ intellectual property, confidential communications and private information with these email security best practices.
Email Policies
As one of the most simple and obvious solutions for email security, each business should have a comprehensive email policy for employees to thoroughly read and enforce. An integral part of creating and implementing email policies is involving your employees. Giving your network administrators the power and the tools to administer these policies is just as important as informing employees on them. Be sure all your key departments, including IT, HR, and legal, understand the policies and are able to carry them out efficiently.
You’ve heard it before, but it’s easily one of the most important email security best practices: educate your employees. Teaching staff how to prevent viruses and keep them from spreading will benefit your organization by saving the time and money it takes to alleviate these threats.
Prevent Virus Outbreaks
According to Osterman Research Inc., 64% of organizations have experienced malware infiltration through email. Using antivirus software is the best way to mitigate infections from viruses and malware. You should use only email providers that offer automatic antivirus protection, allowing you to open emails from trusted sources with only the attachments you’re expecting.
You can reduce the amount of spam your employees spread by encouraging them to be particular about where they post or provide email addresses. Never forward chain messages because this reveals coworker email addresses to other parties, and gives spammers an open door to their inboxes.
When you or your employees do accidentally open spam, don’t click any of the links it contains. Even if the email offers the opportunity to unsubscribe or remove you from the mailing list, these links could bait you to a virus. It’s best to delete the email, change your password and take precaution.
Systematically Reset Passwords
Using spouse names, birthdays and other generic information makes it easy for a hacker to crack your email. The hardest passwords to configure are the ones without purpose or reason. Two or three times a year, you should change your passwords on all devices and encourage employees to do the same. Follow the tips below to generate a secure and durable password every time:
- Longer passwords are always better
- Combine uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and special characters
- Never use the same password twice
- The best passwords are randomly generated strings of characters
- Use a password manager (such as Dashlane or LastPass) to remember complicated passwords
Email Backup
Backup and archiving solutions allow businesses to access complete message records, even when mail servers go down, employees accidentally delete files and there are email storage limits from the provider. Lost emails need to be recovered rapidly to ensure seamless business continuity and reduce downtime. Investing in a reliable backup service helps businesses maintain their documents and emails in an offsite location in order to safeguard it from loss due to natural disasters, server failure, hardware malfunction, human error and viruses.
At Nordic Backup, we work with all versions of Microsoft Exchange, and we can backup Exchange Databases. With the ability to restore individual emails, attachments and appointments, there is no downtime on the Exchange server that will deter your business from operating efficiently.
Two-Factor Authentication
Setting up two-factor authentication guarantees no hacker can access your email. An effective option would entail sending a confirmation code to your phone. In addition to your username and password, another form of identification is needed to access your email. Have your email provider send a single-use code as a text message to your mobile device. You can set this up either every time you log into the email or only when you login from a new computer.
When it comes to your business’ data, including emails, there are no shortcuts. These email security best practices will help ensure your employees and your business operations are employing leading security standards. However, don’t leave email backup, or any of your important business data for that matter, up to chance. View our affordable Small Business plans to find a simple, automatic and secure cloud backup solution for your small business.
