Happy holidays, to you! We didn’t buy you anything, but we do have a present for you – security tips! With the New Year right around the corner, the holidays are a perfect time to start thinking about new security precautions you can add to your strategy and how you can make 2015 you most secure year yet.

Get your employees and company ready for a new year of security threats by following our three holiday security tips!

3 Holiday security tips

Train employees on best practices in security –again

Make employee security training an annual affair. Just think about all the new things you have learned this year; we bet some of that knowledge could help your employees keep the business safer.

In order to keep employees awake during your training session, make cyber security personal like you would with workplace safety issues. Use real stories to illustrate not only how the company can be hurt by a breach, but also how employees will personally be affected.

Train your employees to detect anomalies

External threats – such as hackers – are very real, but so are internal – employee – threats; as Phil Smith, SVP of government solutions and special investigations at Trustwave, stresses, getting your whole team on board with threat detection is critical. “Our statistics have shown, the companies that are able to self-detect and respond quicker means less data exfiltration and less damage.”

Train employees how to detect anomalies in the data they work with all day; give them information on who to report a problem to and how to do it.

Create a mobile security plan

Analysts are predicting that by 2017 mobile security will no longer be a luxury for employees – it will be a requirement. Save yourself some stress and start creating and implementing your mobile security plan in 2015. Protecting employees’ devices from malware and viruses is going to be a big investment of time and resources; you are more likely to get stakeholders to buy into your plan and budget if you plan ahead and spread out the cost over a couple of years.

We are sure you to-do lists are already overflowing, but adding these tasks to your calendar will save you stress down the road.

What security tip would you add to the list?