If there was one universal truth that affects all businesses regardless of what industry they're in, it's this: every business must be secure in order to move forward. These days, every company has some sort of technology aspect in some format. For service-oriented businesses, this is usually the system that handles payments and other sensitive information. When you're trying to build the latest business model or process, it also becomes important to step back and look at the security side of your operation.

Far too often, businesses don't think about security, and this leads to very expensive data breaches. The last thing that any business wants to really think about is the massive cost of cleaning up after a serious security breach. Of course, it goes without saying that all security breaches are pretty serious. Thankfully, you can stake your claim to better data security in three short steps. Each step is designed to be as logical as possible, and short enough that most business managers will be able to handle them in a relatively short amount of time.

First and foremost, you want to make sure that you understand what security problems are lurking within your organization. You might think that everything is airtight, but you could be terribly mistaken. In fact, many unauthorized users use this illusion of security in order to get business managers to let their guard down and keep it that way. Getting a vulnerability assessment done can help you shine a light on any flaws and issues within your existing system. If you find that your current network has a few problems that need to be resolved, don't worry -- this is perfectly fine. It's better to know what you're up against than to just assume that everything is fine.

From there, you will need to make sure that you look at the current security rules in place for the organization. Since technology moves very quickly, you might find that the rules that you had set up when the system was first implemented are no longer valid. Just like in the first step, this is something that is perfectly fine as well. In fact, it would be surprising to find that your organization is doing everything right from the very beginning, since this is not something that happen s very often.

Finally, you will want to take the information that you've gleaned in the first two steps and design as well as implement proper solutions. For example, if you find that your security policy does not force your users to change their passwords occasionally, this is something that you will naturally want to add. These small changes can really add up to better data security in a very short amount of time.

Don't be afraid to tweak things as you go along, or seek out the help of a trained data security professional that can do a lot of the "heavy lifting" for you. After all, unless you're in the security business already, these are not things that are going to directly affect your company's bottom line in the traditional sense. There are undoubtedly other things that you will need to do in your company.

All things considered, staking your claim to better data security isn't as difficult as you might think -- why not get started today?