Learning management systems, such as Absorb LMS, have become an integral part of modern organisations. They not only allow organisations to deliver employee training but also facilitate in building and managing their training programmes. For this reason, when selecting an LMS, organisations pay great attention to its administrative features such as progress tracking, reporting, etc. However, one aspect of LMS that gets overlooked the most is security.
Your LMS contains loads of personal and sensitive information related to your employees, customers, partners and other stakeholders. Therefore, the security of your LMS should be taken very seriously.
Here are a few security features that your LMS must have:
1. Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)
Secure Sockets Layer is a security technology that protects internet communications by ensuring privacy, authentication, and integrity. It encrypts all the data being transferred between a user and a web server. It is a must-have feature for every website, especially if they store or handle sensitive information such as credit card details. In addition to this, many browsers mark webpages operating without SSL security as ‘unsafe’ which can affect your Google ranking as well.
Thus, it is important to ensure that your LMS supports SSL before making any investment.
2. Single Sign-on
Your employees may have multiple login credentials that they use to access their main employee portal or profiles on other internal systems. While this may sound ‘secure’ to few, it actually is quite risky. Having multiple usernames and passwords increases the risk of misplacing your credentials or simply forgetting them. This is where tools like SSO come in handy. SSO or Single Sign-On is a user authentication method that relies on a central authentication service. It allows users to enter a single login combination for all connected and independent software systems. Plus, centralised authentication management also enables your IT team to enforce the same security policies and restrictions across all training portals or intranet systems of your organisation.
3. Automatic Updates
Technology moves at a very fast pace. New system updates are released every day and security features are no exception to this. In order to stay in the game, it is important that you implement these updates as soon as they are available. However, with so many tasks in hand, continuous maintenance of your LMS may not be a priority of your IT team. For this purpose, many advanced LMS now come with an automatic update feature. This enables your LMS to automatically fix all existing security patches as well as install updates of other elements, such as gamification, templates, etc too.
4. Password Settings
Having a strong password is the first step towards security. However, users, in general, put little or no effort into setting their passwords. ‘12345’ or ‘Password’ are some of the most common passwords. The problem is that attackers can break through such passwords way too easily. Therefore, many LMS come with a password setting feature that allows your IT team to define the number of characters a password should have, the combination of uppercase and lowercase characters it should follow, the number of non-alphanumeric characters it should have, etc. You can use this feature to also set a validity period after which every user will have to reset his/her password. This can be helpful if you have a large workforce and it is impossible for your IT team to keep a track of each employee’s password.
5. Backups And Disaster Recovery
Taking all necessary precautions and employing high-grade security tools can drastically reduce the risk of a security breach. However, it does not eliminate it. It is always possible for a hacker to access your internal data and modify or delete your files. Thus, it is advisable to select an LMS that allows you to create regular backups of your LMS data and has a strong disaster recovery protocol. It will help you in recovering all your lost data and bouncing back on track easily, in case any unfortunate event takes place.
Conclusion
Whether you are using an LMS to train your workforce or sell your training courses online, keeping it secure should be your top priority. Therefore, before investing make sure that your LMS has the security features mentioned above.
