Securing Business Communications: What IT Pros Need to Know

At a time when organizations heavily depend on video conferencing technology to keep operations running smoothly, security mistakes, even minor ones, can compromise critical business communications and impact the bottom line. Here, RingCentral U.S. senior director Richard Conn outlines four essential security safeguards to shield business communications from prying eyes in 2020 and beyond.

The ongoing technological revolution continues to change the face of business communications. From video conferencingOpens a new window to artificial intelligenceOpens a new window , a huge range of technologies is changing the way we do business. This has other knock-on effects, however, including new security threats that previously we haven’t encountered.

Previously, ensuring robust cybersecurity was a relatively straightforward business, at least when it came to business communications. After all, it’s not so long ago that the lion’s share of these communications was carried out through face-to-face interaction or phone calls.

Now, in this era of the connected workforce, we stay in touch with colleagues (and clients) in a wide variety of different ways. While this has made our working lives much easier, it’s come with new security dangers.

Anyone running a business needs to be intimately aware of the risks these security threats can pose. Security breaches can wreck businesses, destroying years of hard work in the mere blink of an eye. Therefore, every video meetingOpens a new window or group chat has to be as secure as possible so that the only people who are privy to its contents are those who need to be.

In this guide, we’ve outlined four key ground rules for IT teams to help keep business communications safe and secure. Let’s get started.

Establish Clear Policies

Firstly, you need to ensure that your business has a clear set of communication security policies. Before you can draft these policies, however, your cybersecurity team will need to carry out a thorough risk assessment to better understand the potential risks and how to address them.

Your cybersecurity policies will need to cover a wide range of areas. These will include which types of content can be sent and viewed and by whom. They’ll also need to encompass other areas, such as system and network management, digital asset management, physical security, vulnerability management, and incident management.

It’s one thing to have the technology you need, but you need to have a robust security framework in place. Your security policies have to account for human fallibility so that something as simple as a group video chat doesn’t turn into a security risk.

Learn More: Do You VoIP? You Should For Your Business Communications

Encryption Matters

When it comes to keeping business communicationsOpens a new window secure, encryption is an elementary measure. It might sound like a statement of the obvious, but you should be encrypting communications among colleagues and with clients or customers. Otherwise, it’ll be easy for any experienced hacker to gain access to them – and this can have serious consequences for your business, both financially and in terms of customer confidence.

Now that remote working is an everyday reality, organizing a video meeting is a commonplace way of collaborating. However, it can also be a potential security risk if encryption measures aren’t in place.

When asking yourself a question like “what is the best business phone service for small business?” you should be evaluating the security measures it has in place. Many conferencing platforms encrypt video calls as standard. However, there are some that don’t – and if this includes yours, you need to switch.

There are other measures you should take to ensure the security of video conferences and other remote communications. For example, you should password protect your calls and remind participants not to inadvertently display sensitive data (e.g., paperwork, or their password written on a post-it note!), which could compromise confidential or sensitive information. Simple measures like these can minimize the risk to your business and its clients.

Learn More: Why 5G and SD-WAN Is the Next Big Thing in UCaaS

Training Is Key

As always, when it comes to technology, training is vitally important. Today, we’re working with a wider range of apps and tools than ever before. Remember, most of your staff aren’t technological experts. This means that they may not properly understand the tools they’re using, and this can increase the security risks facing your business.

This is why it’s essential to ensure that your staff has access to the training and support they need. It’s not enough to point them in the direction of an ebook or a YouTube video and leave them to their own devices. Even if they do complete the training, you have no way of knowing how much of it they understood.

You must ensure that staff knows what’s required of them when it comes to security. In particular, they need to know how they can use their technology in a way that doesn’t leave them – and you – open to avoidable security problems. After all, if you’re trying to extol, say, the advantages of an online booking system to potential clients, security breaches will clearly deter them.

Much of this training is pretty basic: for example, reminding staff of what malicious emails, IM, or text messages might look like and how to avoid being fooled by them. Security awareness training is, therefore, arguably the most important thing of all. Relatively simple measures to promote a greater understanding of security issues can go a long way to keeping your business communications safe and ensuring data security.  

In addition, it’s about making sure that everyone appreciates the importance of cybersecurity and the damage that breaches can do. If you can ensure buy-in from key stakeholders across your business, you should be in a good position to protect it from security breaches. Staff at all levels must be made to understand why it’s so crucial to treat cybersecurity as a leading priority.

Ensure Enforcement

You can have the best security policies and the most robust protections in theory, but they won’t work without enforcement. It would be best if you had a team dedicated to monitoring and enforcing the communications security policies you’ve put in place. 

In the fast-paced world of modern business, communications are non-stop, and the amount of traffic involved can be huge. In order to track this usage adequately, there needs to be a central control point where compliance can be verified and any enforcement actions carried out. You should ensure that there is a monitoring system which alerts your enforcement team to unauthorized app usage, failed attempts to gain access, and so on.

Closing Thoughts 

Of course, it’s not just business communications that need to be kept secure. If you’re running an online retail business, for example, customers need to have confidence that their data will be kept out of the wrong hands. Simple e-commerce website maintenance can also reduce many security risks. Your customers will thank you for it, and in the long run, your business’s bottom line will benefit.

With data protection regulations around the world growing ever more stringent, it’s never been more important to ensure reliable and robust protections. Not only can data breaches result in mammoth fines from regulators, but they can also do a lot to damage your reputation in the eyes of customers.

As this guide has (hopefully) made clear, keeping business communications secure is vitally important. It might seem like a mammoth undertaking, but well-enforced, simple measures can do a lot to reduce the risk of security breaches.