Data Security Overview [Video]

We live in an ever increasing technology driven world. We have data here, data there, and it is always going up here and it is going down there. Half the time we don’t know what it is doing and where it is going. However it is important for us to know how best we can secure ourselves in this type of world.

Today I want to go through some of the best practices we do and how we can provide those to you. This will help make sure your data is safe and secure throughout all of your online experiences. I put a lot of time and effort into making sure we do the best job that we can from a data security stand point for our clients.

Data Security Tips

Lock Down Your Passwords

The first thing I wanted to talk about is locking down your passwords. In other words, lock it down.

It is often tempting for us to use the same three or four passwords for every account we log into.

If you do this, you are not alone. We are not here to shame you or to judge you. We would highly recommend that you use a password manager that would actually help you generate your passwords, manage them for you on an ongoing basis, help you share with different parties such as family and friends that may need to get them, and they can generate and auto fill your passwords for you as well.

Update Your Router Settings 

The next thing we would recommend that you do is update your router settings.

So one of the often overlooked things we have available to us is the ability to change things that go on in our home networks. Most commonly we receive a router right from our internet service provider, but we don’t always actually go in and mess with the settings.

Now for the most part that can be OK, but if someone were to gain access to your network and you didn’t change the default passwords, it is possible for that person to make changes to your network without you knowing.

So how do we go about fixing this?

So if you look at your home router, you will notice there is a label on there. It contains your default username and password.

I would recommend that you use those to log into your home network settings, update that default password to something that you know, perhaps managed by your password manager, and really lock down your home network. Therefore, if someone was able to gain access to your network, they wouldn’t have the additional step to make changes to your network.

Protect Yourself On Public Wifi With A VPN Service

Finally, as we are often out and about, I fully understand the free wifi at Starbucks or the airport is really tempting to use. I’m not saying not to use it, but what I am saying is let’s make sure we are using it in a very safe manner. So one of the things we can use to help us do that is to actually use what is called a VPN service, or a virtual private network.

One of the reasons this is so important is because as you are working back and forth with websites, we want to make sure your data is transmitted as encrypted and securely as possible. Using a VPN basically allows you to enrapt all the data between your device and the VPN servers so that data is never intercepted or decrypted by anyone else without knowledge of it.

When we log into financial accounts, we want to make sure no one else has access to that data. It is really important to make sure that data is safe. This prevents us from potential identity theft in the future.

If you have questions about data security or you want to go through a quick run through of this is what you are currently doing and how we can make it better, let us know. We’d love to be able to help and have a quick conversation about how best Financial Design Studio can help you.