ITAR Compliance has been the newest regulation to affect the manufacturing industry. If you haven’t yet read our ITAR Compliance: What You Need to Know article, you will want to read that to get a basic level of ITAR Compliance understanding prior to reading this article. Your organization needs to understand what ITAR Compliance is and what responsibilities you have to ensure your business meets the requirements. You also will want to educate yourselves on the penalties you could face by failing to comply. One of the hardest regulations to meet is in securing your ITAR-controlled data. ITAR Data Security needs to be a top priority for your organization

What is difficult for most organizations is that data security doesn’t have an end point. You can’t ever achieve this and stop working towards it. Data security is an endless journey and a constant struggle to protect your assets. The one thing that is challenging for Manufacturers is that most the information available is created from legal companies, not technology. To properly protect your data and remain ITAR Complaint, you will need to work with an IT Consultant. Leave the IT expertise to the IT experts.
While data security will have different requirements for every company, here are some simple best practices to follow in securing ITAR data:

• Build and maintain an ITAR specific information security policy, including both physical and network security
• Build and maintain a secure network by installing and maintaining firewall configuration to protect data and avoiding the use of vendor-supplied passwords and other security defaults
• Assign a unique ID to each user with computer access
• Regularly test security systems and processes
• Protect sensitive data with encryption
• Regularly monitor and test networks
• Implement strong access control measures
• Track and monitor all access to network resources and sensitive data
• Build and maintain a vulnerability management program
• Implement measures to prevent the loss of ITAR-controlled data

This list is a simple list and definitely not exhaustive. It is meant to provide a starting point for securing sensitive data and meeting ITAR compliance. Your organization needs to implement the above list at minimum to ensure that ITAR data is accessible, but yet secure. I strongly recommend you partner with an IT Consultant that specializes in IT Security solutions, and has experience dealing with ITAR Compliance. 2W Tech has IT Consultants on staff that are Security solution experts and have several clients already taking steps towards achieving ITAR Compliance standards.
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