Festive season: 5 Tips to keep your enterprise safe

No cyber security program is fool-proof. Not even the largest enterprises with the brightest and best IT security brains, sophisticated systems and limitless resources can afford to take it easy when it comes to keeping enterprise networks safe from hackers and cyber criminals.

The risks that enterprises face from cybercrime are multiplied during the festive season, when employees are scrambling to catch online discounts while logged into office networks. A survey conducted by Dell SonicWALL found that most employees are unable to recognize online threats against the corporate network and hence could potentially open the network to malware. Moreover, large enterprises with BYOD and mobile computing need to take precautions as employees often venture beyond the firewall with sensitive data.

Cyber criminals could be interested in your enterprise for various reasons. They may want to steal proprietary information, intellectual property, strategic client and market data that can be sold to competition or used for market manipulation. Hackers could even obtain information that could be used to interfere with company operations and seriously affect productivity.

Apart from these obvious security risks, employees' shopping online with enterprise bandwidth and on company time also affects productivity and slows down network efficiency.

So what can businesses do to protect themselves from such malware attacks and keep their organizations productive?

Here are 5 useful tips to guard against vulnerabilities and keep your office network cyber-safe this holiday season:

1.Asses your current security systems. No matter how tight your controls are, cyber criminals are getting better and smarter by the day. A data breach could be disastrous for the reputation of your firm. Dell SecureWorks provides world-class information security services to help organizations of all sizes protect their IT assets, comply with regulations and reduce security costs without re-hauling your current IT systems.

2.Next Generation Firewalls with advanced features that protect against cyber threats and assure productivity. These firewalls provide advanced features such as content filtering and application intelligence and control. This allows companies to determine what applications or websites employees can access on the corporate network. Dell SonicWALL Next-Generation Firewalls with integrated URL/web filtering help organizations enforce their protection policies, drive productivity and block unproductive, inappropriate and illegal web content. This feature can keep businesses productive even while employees shop online, as it protects the corporate network from malicious attacks from phishing, cyber scams and threats from fraudulent emails, websites and malware. Application intelligence and control functionality also helps protect the corporate network from the internal harm employees render when they use bandwidth to shop online, share gift lists, watch videos and send holiday greetings.

3.Ramp up email security systems. The Dell SonicWALL email security platform deployed either as a service on the firewall or through a dedicated solution stops phishing and zombie attacks, spam, and viruses with more than 99 percent effectiveness. It uses multiple established, patented techniques including reputation checks that verify not only a message's sender IP reputation, but also the reputation of its content, structure, links, images, and attachments.

4.Invest in a Robust anti-virus, anti-spyware, and anti-malware software and make sure that they are regularly scanned and updated. Since spam and malware evolves constantly there is no single analytic technique that can protect against it. Anti-spam and email security platforms like Dell SonicWALL can effectively guard against such attacks as they employ more than 14 different techniques, including advanced IP reputation checks, Dell SonicWALL GRIDprint analysis, adversarial Bayesian filtering, image analysis and gibberish detection to block bad email and deliver good email.

5.Ensure robust Identity and Access Management Solutions. Dell Quest makes security and compliance simple and efficient with Quest One Identity Solutions. With a modular, yet integrated, approach to identity and access management, Quest One addresses both immediate concerns and future business needs with solutions that reduce risks and the costs of audit, and empower IT to govern the access needed to operate an agile and effective business today. Dell Quest offers best practices to protect the enterprise.