How to Secure Your Digital Assets: Best Practices

The security of digital assets is of the utmost importance in the digital age and is something that both organizations and individuals need. Cybercriminals are increasingly focusing on digital assets, part of things like financial records and intellectual property, customer data, and marketing materials. It is so important to keep these assets safe from theft, loss, or unauthorized access. In this article,  you will learn about the best practices for securing your digital assets such that they remain integral, confidential, and available.

Understanding Digital Assets

Digital assets can be many types of electronic files and information; including:

Records: Contracts, Publications, and Legal Papers.

Media Files: images, videos, audio files, and presentations.

Structured Data: Databases, Spreadsheets, Customer Data.

Software: This includes applications, code, and development projects.

Intellectual Property:  includes patents, trademarks, and other proprietary information.

Securing Your Digital Assets

There are several reasons why it is imperative to secure your digital assets.

Avoiding Data Breaches: Data breaches can cause financial loss, penalties, and loss of face value.

Compliance: Bureaucratic rules insist on various data protection steps that are not applicable with legacy systems.

Business Continuity: By safeguarding digital assets, one can ensure that in times of security incidents, business operations can run smoothly in the background.

Protect Intellectual Property: Preserving intellectual rights is a means to keep up an aggressive bit.

How to Secure My Digital Assets?

1. Enforce Strong Access Controls

RBAC (Role-Based Access Control): The system will be controlled by a few roles. Make sure your employees have access only to information they neesd for their role.

Blueberry DAM offers comprehensive security mechanism.

Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA):  Utilising MFA would present an extra obstacle, uncomment if you have MFA activated. This means that users are prompted to present two or more pieces of evidence to access.

The least Privilege Principle:  Here is where you will give access to the users to perform their tasks least amount of access they need to get their job done. An important best practice is to review and modify the access permissions regularly.

2. Encrypt Data

Data in Transit: Ensure data sent over networks is protected by encryption with secure protocol TLS (Transport Layer Security).

Encrypts data on servers, databases, and storage devices. Encrypt everything with good encryption algorithms and manage encryption keys properly.

Enable End-to-End Encryption: For important messages use end-to-end, this feature encrypts the data so that it is only decrypted by the final device, not at the receiving end.

3. Always install the latest updates in your systems.

Software Updates: Ensure all your software, including operating systems, applications, and security tools is kept up to date with the latest patches and updates.

Vulnerability Management: Regularly perform vulnerability assessments to detect and remediate security vulnerabilities in your systems and applications.

Automated Updates: Automatic updates enable timely patching of known vulnerabilities.

4. Backup and Disaster Recovery

Trusted backups: Set up a backup strategy that ensures a regular backup of all essential digital assets. Offsite/cloud storage of backups Store backups in different locations.

Backup Testing: Data backup and restoration processes should be tested on a regular basis to enable the recovery of data in case of loss or breach!

BDR (Backup and disaster recovery) plan- Create & update the disaster recovery plan which includes data recovery and business continuity procedures.

5. Network Security

Firewalls: They help you to protect your network from unauthorized access and monitor inbound and outbound traffic.

Intrusion Detection and Prevention Systems (IDPS):  IDPSs can alert on and/or block potential malicious activities on your network.

Separate Networks: Segregate (VLAN) your network to contain potential intrusions. Separate zones for different classes of data and functions.

6. Secure Cloud Storage

Use a reputable cloud provider: choose a well-known cloud service provider with a good track record, for security features and support for compliance with relevant regulations.

Data Encryption: Make sure all your data stored in the cloud is encrypted in transit and at rest.

Here are some of the pointers of security measures: Access Controls: Enforce strong access controls in the cloud storage environments and monitor them.

7. Another step toward achieving compliance with ISO 27001 is training and awareness for your employees.

Training Classes: Hold mandatory quarterly training classes for employees to learn about best practices, how to identify phishing attempts, what staff should do if something seems off, etc.

Training program campaigns: Update the ongoing security awareness program for consumers to be in the know about the latest threats and security measures to be taken.

Training classes for employees om security.

Perform phishing simulations: Phishing simulations to assess and enhance the level of phish detection and response readiness of your workforce.

8. Monitor and Audit

Real-time monitoring: Make sure your IT environment is constantly monitored so that you can detect and respond to security incidents as soon as they appear.

Audit Logs: The platform preserves rich audit logs that keep track of every access & activity associated with digital assets. Audit logs for abnormal or malicious behavior

Incident Response Plan: Develop and maintain an incident response plan that incorporates processes for response and recovery in the event of a security incident.

9. Take Measures to Secure your Data Physically

You need to manage who leaves and enters the building where your most valuable digital assets are, like server rooms and data center, for that, you will want to have physical access controls in place.

Surveillance: Install surveillance cameras and employ security personnel to patrol and protect physical sites.

To protect against environmental threats such as fire, flood, and temperature extremes, the following environmental controls to secure physical storage environments must be put in place:

10. Part of the answer comes down to secure software development practices

Secure Code: Follow secure coding practices to reduce vulnerabilities in software applications. Abide by the OWASP Top Ten Style of recommendations.

Secure code put in place to protect assets.

Regular Code Reviews: Have the code regularly reviewed to detect vulnerabilities early using security testing like static and dynamic analysis.

DevSecOps:  embed security in the DevOps process to make sure that security is taken into account at every stage of the software development lifecycle.

Advanced Security Measures

If you have valuable or very sensitive digital assets look for more enhanced security features:

1. Zero Trust Architecture

The Zero Trust Principle: Implement the Zero Trust security model, which considers no entity, inside or beyond the network to be trustworthy. Always test and validate whether access requests are legitimate.

Micro-Segmentation: One of the most effective ways to reduce the windows of vulnerability but also let attackers themselves in without causing any damage, with zero-day exploits, etc.

2. 3. AI, Machine Learning

Behavioral Analytics: Use AI and machine learning to analyze user behavior and identify abnormalities that could imply a security threat.

Automated Threat Detection: Use artificial intelligence (AI) powered security tools to automatically identify and remediate potential threats as they happen.

AI helps to detect threats.

3. Blockchain Technology

Preprocessing: Use blockchain technology To generate Immutable, tamper-able records of transactions and changes to data, bolstering the integrity and auditability of digital assets.

Develop Disruptive Security: Investigate alternative security models that combat the single points of failure bug. 

Summary,

Modern business strategy demands that digital assets be secured. Through the adoption of security measures like access controls, data encryption, regular patches, and employee education, enterprises can shield their precious digital assets from threats. For higher value or more sensitive assets, even more, advanced measures such as Zero Trust architecture and AI-driven security tools provide an extra layer of protection. Continuous monitoring, auditing, and a robust incident response ensure that organizational.

Please visit Blueberry DAM free trial for more information.