You have invested your time, resources, and energy into growing your business. Data protection should be a major concern for every smart business. Nobody is guaranteed to be safe from cybercriminals.
With the likes of well-known companies such as Uber and Equifax falling foul of major data breaches, it is clear that even the major players are not out of reach of criminals. Businesses of all sizes are targeted millions of times a day.
Hackers have very sophisticated systems that allow them to constantly scan for ways to get access to your systems. For this reason, your business needs to invest in cybersecurity. There are many potential disasters that can harm your business, and you need to continually protect and be prepared to defend yourself as you grow.
Ensure You Have Top-Notch Security
Cyber attacks are a growing concern for small businesses. According to the FBI’s Internet Crime Report, cybercrimes cost businesses $2.7 billion in 2018 alone. Small businesses are attractive targets because they generally lack the security infrastructure of larger businesses.
A good IT Support managed service provider will audit and assess your entire network. By reviewing every policy, procedure, and weakness in the network, your managed service provider will create a plan of action.
Having expert advice on hand will help you make the most constructive and strategic decisions for your business. You will get help repairing weaknesses in your infrastructure, as well as assistance in developing new procedures and a disaster recovery plan.
Enhanced Training
Many cyber attacks follow on from human errors. For example, a staff member may click a link in an email believing it to be genuine. The link takes them to a site where they enter their login credentials. The site is fake, and immediately, hackers have access to that account. There are approximately 135 million attempted phishing attempts made each day. Your business will be targeted frequently.
By retraining your employees on the common methods of attack will give them a greater understanding of how to avoid putting sensitive data at risk. Don’t put your company at risk and leave your reputation up to chance. Cyber attacks are constantly evolving, so it is important to be aware of the most common types of cyber threats.
Controlled Access
When you are handling sensitive data, particularly information that does not belong to you, every care must be taken to ensure only relevant people see it. Passwords are the obvious way of doing this.
Passwords are not perfect though. They can be stolen through phishing emails, or they can be given away. When someone accesses data through the use of a password, it does not flag up as being a problem. This is because the system does not know that the wrong person is viewing the information. Preventing passwords from getting into the wrong hands is one aspect of cybersecurity.
Another vital step is to protect the passwords, and have further strategies in place that can render the information useless if it is in the wrong hands. By changing login details frequently, you will render any stolen passwords obsolete.
Make sure that passwords are always unique, and that they use a mixture of lower case and upper case letters, numbers, and symbols. Multi-factor authentication should be used for information that is very sensitive. It is also important that you delete user accounts of employees that no longer work for you.