The design teams you see today operate very differently from the ones you usually observed a decade ago. They are highly connected and require tools that can help them collaborate across platforms and even continents.
However, this connectivity can expose your team and business to many cyber threats that can jeopardize your client data and design workflows. Making your design teams cyber-proof is considered to be a technical necessity these days, and can help you boost the productivity and effectiveness of your design processes.
Before delving deeper into the various ways in which you can make your design team cyber-proof, let us look at the typical cyber threats that can make your design process and workflow more vulnerable.
Understanding the Cyber Threats in a Typical Design Workflow
Depending on the scope of your project, your design team could be using multiple tools and platforms for accomplishing important activities such as file sharing, project management, and processing feedback.
The multi-faceted process of a design workflow leaves you vulnerable to different kinds of cyber attacks, such as:
- Phishing attacks: These entail malicious parties sending emails to trick your employees and team members into divulging passwords or sensitive information.
- Unauthorized Access: Outsiders can easily infiltrate your systems by taking advantage of weak passwords or shared logins.
- Malware: You could have infected files or links that can compromise your systems, devices, and even steal your data.
- Data Leaks: You could accidentally share any of your confidential client assets or project files, causing leakage of sensitive information
Any of these cyber threats has the potential to cause project delays, chip away at client trust, and even lead to legal consequences. Being aware of these threats can help you prevent data loss or corruption, which can even lead to negative financial and business repercussions. If uncontrolled, even minor cyber threats can harm your business reputation and erode customer trust.
How to Secure Your Design Process?
The best way to secure your design process and make it cyber-proof is to ensure that you integrate security in every part of your design workflow and process. That said, here are some of the primary steps you can take to secure your design process:
1. Implement Strong Passwords & Multi-Factor Authentication
While there are several sophisticated and state-of-the-art tools and mechanisms to safeguard your systems. To fortify the front door of your system, you must follow certain practices that will help you get your basic security right from the get-go. Use a password manager that can help you generate and store complex passwords that cannot be decoded easily, and avoid reusing these passwords across platforms.
Moreover, implement an extra layer of protection for your critical accounts by using multi-factor authentication (MFA). Doing so ensures that even if your password is compromised, unauthorized parties cannot gain access to your system.
2. Managing Access Controls With Your Team
Implementing access controls is a great way to double down on the security and governance of your system, depending on the roles assigned to users in the organization. One of the best ways to introduce access control within your system is to define roles for each user and then assign permissions to those roles, and this approach is known as Role-based Access Control (RBAC).
While administrators take the lead on managing the system properly, they are also responsible for assigning permissions and roles to specific users. The biggest benefit offered by RBAC is better scalability and governance to help you navigate your processes and projects smoothly. RBAC can also ensure that the right people have access to the right data and systems at the right time.
3. Secure Your Design Tools and Software
When choosing tools and platforms to automate and level up your design process, you must prioritize tools that provide robust security features over others. Platforms like humanizer offer advanced AI-driven security and collaboration capabilities that not only safeguard your design workflows but also help your team communicate more effectively across platforms and locations. At the very least, these web design tools should offer end-to-end encryption to protect your data from getting intercepted, or mishandled in transit or storage.
Choose platforms and vendors that offer regular and timely security patches so that you can manage the overall integrity and security of your process. If there are a lot of third-party integrations, you should also remove any that are no longer useful to you.
In addition to everything else, you must get access to at least a layer of two-factor authentication (2FA) to protect your data and intellectual property.
For instance, if you are choosing an email marketing tool to boost the communication between stakeholders, ensure that all the data you exchange is secure and encrypted.
4. Develop an Incident Response Plan
Even with the right security strategies and protocols in place, your system might not be equipped to combat cyber threats. It is best to consider your system vulnerable to threats and create an incident response plan that will help you effectively and quickly respond to cyber threats.
As part of your incident response plan, you should document clear procedures to deal with different types of threats, such as malware, phishing, and data leaks. You should also assign specific roles and responsibilities to each step in your incident response plan, in the order of: immediate actions, containment and recovery, and post-incident review. It is also best to jot down the tasks and activities associated with each step of the process.
Most importantly, remember to deliver honesty and proactivity to your customers and ensure timely communication with them.
5. Implement Real-Time Threat Detection
While choosing the right design tools and building strong policies, implementing real-time threat detection mechanisms can help you strengthen your cyber defenses. Set up real-time alerts for any unusual activity or behavior, including unexpected file transfers, unauthorized access, or changes to critical data, and more.
Most security tools come with a centralized dashboard that helps aggregate logs from all your design tools and platforms, spot patterns, and delve deeper into anomalies so you can handle them on time and perform effective compliance checks.
6. Build a Security-First Culture
Take a security-first approach and ensure that your entire team is on the same page about security by building a security-focused culture. Conduct quarterly training sessions so that you educate your team members about the latest threats, practicing safe online behavior, and real-world case studies.
Aside from regular cybersecurity training, you must set up dedicated communication channels for reporting suspicious behavior and encourage team members to flag concerns and ask questions fearlessly. You can also benefit by designating specific employees as security champions who will act as the primary point of contact for everything security-related.
7. Safeguard Clients’ Data & Intellectual Property
One of the biggest responsibilities you have as a web designer is to protect and manage your clients’ data properly. Clients not only trust you with their campaign strategies and brand assets, but also confidential information that must be secured at all times.
You can follow secure file-sharing practices by avoiding public links. You should also consider using secure and password-protected sharing or platforms that may help you manage file security in a better way by setting expiration dates for shared files. Store files on reputable cloud platforms with strong security certifications and enable encryption at all times.
You can also limit access to stakeholders by inviting only the necessary ones to view or comment, and promptly removing access when a project ends or people leave. Other than this, you can also leverage watermarks and non-disclosure agreements to enforce and manage boundaries for data sharing and distribution.
8. Monitor, Review, and Update Your Security Policies
To ensure the timely prevention of any damage caused by cyber threats, constant monitoring of your systems and the performance of your security strategies is imperative. After all, cybersecurity is a journey that has many pit stops where you have to reassess and tweak your security strategies.
Set up a schedule to review and update your security policies at least a few times a year, and ensure that you educate yourself and your team so that you can be fully updated about the current security threats and best practices. Regular audits and tweaking your security strategies based on the insights and observations from them can help you improve and generate better results.
Concluding Remarks
If design is at the forefront of your business operations, cybersecurity is not an area that you can handle casually. You must get a better understanding of your threats, build a security-first culture, and choose security tools and policies to protect client data. Moreover, having a robust incident response plan and constant monitoring and improvement of your systems will help you combat most cyberthreats seamlessly.
Along with these activities, you should also focus on educating and training your design team so that they can stay updated with the strategies and communication protocols you have in place.
Also Read: How Do You Effectively Collaborate With a Team of Outsourced Graphic Designers?
