Starting a business is an exciting time in your life. Operating a business is a goal that many people have. Although you might have business plans to make, workspace planning, hiring and many others in your to do list. What is often missed is having a strong plan to keep your business secure from cyber attacks.
With many businesses moving their operations online, they are more and more susceptible to cyber crime like hacks and phishing. These data breaches can be incredibly costly for companies and can also cost you the trust of your customers. With that in mind, there are some small but important steps that you can take now to ensure that you have an extra layer of security to protect your business and client information from hackers and phishing attacks.
Here are four basic cybersecurity steps you must implement when starting or running a business:
With new techniques, technologies and tools constantly coming out to help with security, it is important that your employees (as well as yourself) are trained upon best cybersecurity practices. While hacks do occur, it is actually human error that causes most breaches and security incidents. So, educating employees is very important.
While many companies will opt to provide their own cybersecurity training, there are also companies and services out there, such as Alpine Security, that offer training on all things cybersecurity and will handle it for you. Think of the amount you spend on educating your customers as an investment. It is a lot cheaper than what you will be responsible for if a breach occurs.
This might seem incredibly obvious, but be sure to use strong passwords for all accounts and software that your company will use. With how important this is, it is shocking how many employees and companies continue to use simple passwords that can easily be hacked into or discovered.
Your passwords should be relatively long and feature letters, numbers, and symbols. You should also be sure to change them semi-frequently as an added little bit of protection. In addition to passwords, you should try to use 2FA, which will ensure that the person requesting to sign in the account is the person the account belongs to or is authorized to use it.
No matter how prepared or secure you and your company are, accidents can always happen. Power outages, surges, natural disasters or machine failure can all happen and wreak havoc on your data. Unless you want to risk losing a ton of sensitive and private information held on computers and devices, you should be sure to create frequent backups.
These backups can be done either manually or automatically most of the time. Manually creating and updating backups will require transferring important information and data to external hard drives, while many automatically-updating backups will be kept in the cloud. Whichever method you choose, you can rest assured that even during outages or failures, your data and information will be safe and secure.
Just because someone works at your company, that doesn’t mean they need full access to all of the information and data your company keeps. Only people who truly need to use the information should have access to it. The more people you give access to, the higher the chance that something goes wrong.
As for how you select who has access, you can choose from a number of different methods. Some focus on seniority, others look at job title and roles and some allow the owner of the data to choose. Whatever method is used, access restriction can help ensure data remains safe and sound.
Hopefully these steps will help you carve some strong cybersecurity best practices at your company. In the present world of increased cyber threats, security of all your assets should be taken incredibly seriously. Trust and credibility can be lost in a matter of minutes, if you are unable to protect your client’s information. Shield yourself from the cyber crimes and thrive in your business!