ILMA Compoundings - Jul/Aug 2021 - 21

People might be the weakest link for your cybersecurity,
but they are also your first line of defense. It is vital to have
the right people working for you. " You need to know your
team to the extent that you trust their ability to safeguard
the information under their control, " Pierre said. " Have
the right policies in place that both ensure you're hiring the
right people and establish guidelines for confidentiality and
data security. "
Those same guidelines also should apply when working
with outside partners. " If you share your blend for manufacturing
purposes - say, to expand your capacity - it's
important to be extremely diligent in how you select those
partners, to make sure they also will protect the information
you share with them, " he added.
THE BEST DEFENSE
After employee training in data security, protect the data itself
with appropriate security systems, antivirus and anti-malware
software, and secure processes, Aquitania advised. Perhaps the
most important step of all, though, is to establish procedures
for regularly and frequently backing up your data.
" People get into trouble when they're not diligent about their
He added, " Companies need to make sure that access to
certain platforms or subscriptions are disabled when people
leave companies or organizations, to make sure colleagues
can no longer access sensitive info after they leave. "
O'Donnell pointed out that data protection also includes
establishing processes that make it difficult for, say, your
salespeople to go to a competitor, access your customer
list, print it out and hand it over. " Today, with our current
customer-relationship management (CRM) systems and the
ability to download data onto your own computer, that's a
real risk, " he said. " The CRM is going to include customers,
pricing, transaction history - everything that makes it
possible to service that customer well. "
Taking basic security even further, he said, " Train people
to sign out if they need to walk away from their terminals.
If sensitive information is left up on the screen, it can be
seen - and stolen - by plant visitors, delivery people and
anyone else just walking by. Little, practical things like that
are part of the whole cybersecurity plan. "
backup processes, " O'Donnell observed. " Maybe people think
they're being backed up, but they don't pay attention to it -
especially in smaller companies, where the IT person could be
the office manager, the general manager or somebody else who's
wearing a bunch of other hats. It's a background process, so
they assume it's happening in the background. And then there's
a problem - and it turns out the backups are three months
old. It's really important that companies pay attention to what
their processes are and that they have the right things in place
to protect themselves. A diligent backup can save you a lot of
headaches and a lot of money. "
It has been said by some computer industry insiders that
if your data does not exist in three different places, it doesn't
exist at all. In other words, a single backup is insufficient to
ensure data integrity. O'Donnell believes that kind of " belt
and suspenders " approach may be overkill for manufacturers,
who must balance the value of data protection with the
associated costs of multiple backup streams and the time,
knowledge and infrastructure required.
Because of this, some companies contract with a serverhosting
service. " Third-party server-hosting services, like Amazon's
AWS, for instance, include a lot of monitoring services
and may have a whole security team making sure that only the
right people are coming into their servers, " O'Donnell said.
" But you pay for that kind of service and protection. "
In addition, manufacturers still need to be diligent in
how they vet and work with such a service. " If they're hosting
your data, your website and so on, you are potentially
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