IndexCentralize identityImplement strong authenticationReduce attack surfaceEnable visibility and responseOrganizations today face the challenge of protecting data in multiple locations, including cloud, mobile devices, emerging platforms, and applications legacy. And the volume and speed are also increasing. The bad news is that organizations across all verticals and sizes are affected by data breaches. Ponemon reports that the average total cost of a data breach increased from $3.62 million to $3.86 million, an increase of 6.4%. However, the same study reports that companies that resolved a breach in less than 30 days saved over $1 million compared to those that took more than 30 days to resolve. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay As you strengthen your defenses as the ubiquity of data increases, it's critical to understand that many of these data breaches are identity-based attacks ; in fact, 81% of data breaches involve stolen/weak credentials. It's time to take proactive measures to combat data breaches. Use this checklist for strategic and tactical tips to protect yourself from data breaches. Centralize identity Today, organizations have thousands of applications, each with an account and password. Managing so many accounts and passwords is an increasing challenge. Many of your employees use the same, often weak, passwords across multiple accounts. Unfortunately, hackers know this weakness and exploit it. Centralize your accounts and log in with single sign-on. Consider eliminating passwords where possible. Enable strong, unique passwords everywhere. Implement strong authentication Even if you have strong passwords, these passwords can still be phished and stolen. Strong authentication helps strengthen and strengthen access to your organization's most important asset: data. Implement multi-factor authentication (MFA). Strengthen authentication in as many places as possible. Sometimes a hacker comes in with a stolen identity and then takes advantage of the escalation of access privileges. Enable an MFA solution with adaptive functionality. This technology can help make intelligent, contextual access decisions based on device and connection attributes. Overall, this increases usability by reducing the load on the end user so that they do not receive requests continuously, but only when necessary. Reduce your attack surface Users leaving your organization can result in “zombie” accounts (forget to deprovision), which can create an open attack surface. Additionally, in your company, many users/employees change roles, which can accidentally create excess privileges. For example, an employee who moves from payroll to human resources may still have access to W2 information and, therefore, leave that person's account open as an opportunity for attackers. Overall, you want to automate provisioning and deprovisioning for when users leave the organization or change roles. Please note: this is just an example. Get a customized paper from our expert writers now. Get a custom essay Automate provisioning and de-provisioning whenever possible. When you automate the onboarding and offboarding process, you don't have to remember to update roles/permissions or deactivate accounts. Enable reporting so you can see who/what groups have access to apps or if access is too privileged. Make sure the right people have the