Benefits Of An Acceptable Use Policy

Many businesses are adopting an acceptable use policy or AUP in order to create guidelines for their team around social media, use of devices in the office, acceptable downloading and use of the internet. Setting up an AUP not only benefits your internal team but it limits the information being shared with individuals outside of your organization. 

Where do you start with creating regulations?

Outline specific guidelines you would like your team to follow around Social Media. Outline what the type of information your team is allowed to share about their job, how are they allowed to access social media- via personal email, where they are allowed to access Social Media- on their break on their own device. If they work remotely what rules can you set up that work for your business if the company owns their device. You can also apply these guidelines for internet use.

For your businesses cybersecurity are there regulations for accessing restricted information, modifying access data such as passwords, reading suspicious email attachments, using public Wi-Fi connections, and utilizing company-approved  authentication techniques- MFA with each individuals device? no sharing log ins or joint accounts and there should be a guideline that passwords need to be reset not shared with an administrator. 

Guest permissions is another policy that your team should all be aware of, when you have vendors and clients visiting your site, your team should be allowing them to access a guest wifi that is separate from the main business network.

A significant number of companies either encourage or mandate that workers use their own devices for work-related tasks. An acceptable usage policy (AUP) is required in order to avoid any safety concerns and ambiguities over how these gadgets should be used.

Create a list of acceptable programs that are safe to use and download for your business. Applications like bitTorent should be black listed due to how easy it is to download and unsafe program.

Once these regulations are in place your team will lower the risk of unsafe programs being run in the background of your business. Your company owned equipment will run smoother and can easily be updated and will not get over run by unnecessary applications that take up important space on your employees computers. Viruses will not be easily passed and your business information will not be shared so easily on the dark web. If you need support implementing these policies along with privileged access management and zero-trust. We can offer consulting support for your team. Call 416-900-6047 and contact us today to assist you.