Small Business Cyber Security Guide
Small Business Cyber Security Guide.
Cybersecurity has long been a mounting concern for small businesses. Without the resources of your larger counterparts, it can be hard to see how you can protect yourself from the threats found in the digital world. We’ve compiled a range of the best practices to follow when you want to improve your cybersecurity and will be exploring them in this guide. First, though, it’s worth understanding the threat you face.
Understanding The Cyber Security Threat
It’s easy to be consumed by thoughts of elite hackers and other professional cybercriminals trying to steal your data and harm your business. In reality, though, most of the threats businesses face online aren’t targetted, and occur as a result of poor practices. This makes it much easier to deal with the cybersecurity challenges you’re facing, but you still have to work hard to ensure that you’re following the right steps.
Maintaining Cyber Security Within Your Business
Cybersecurity has come a long way over the last couple of decades, with increasing threats forcing companies to work harder to keep themselves locked down. You can find a range of basic principles and ideas that can be followed to improve your business’s cybersecurity below.
Network Security
Keeping a computer network secure takes a few different steps. First, you need to make sure that you have an up to date firewall protecting the whole network by blocking malicious content. Alongside this, it can be a good idea to keep your routers and other network hardware up to date, changing wireless network passwords on a regular basis. Some companies will even hire someone to monitor their network traffic to watch for threats.
Computer Security
Each of the computers in your office or other business premises have the potential to be a gateway for cybercrime. They need to be kept up to date, and it can be worth installing anti-malware software to perform regular scans and keep the machines clean. Some companies choose to use virtual machines to make it easier to isolate issues on the network.
Password Hygiene
Passwords are often leaked, creating major problems when people use the same passwords all the time. It’s a good idea to have your users change their passwords each month, forcing them to use something strong and encouraging them to avoid duplicate passwords. Password banks can be a good tool to use when you’re trying to make this easier for your team.
Data Security & Backups
Keeping your internal data secure will be a top priority, especially if you deal with any sensitive customer information. Cloud services make it much easier to keep this sort of data secure, with many providers offering incredibly high-security standards with even their most basic packages. This can also make the process of making backups simpler, as you won’t have to bog down your own servers with the job.
Mobile Devices
Just about everyone in the modern world has access to a smartphone. It’s natural for your employees to want to access their work from this device, and many people will use their work email accounts on their phones. If you’re going to let them do this, though, you need to make sure that they have secure passwords on their devices that will prevent unauthorised access. Providing your team with smartphones can help with this.
Internal Policies
As the last tip to consider, it’s time to think about the internal policies your business has in place. Keeping your employees from making mistakes, being prepared for unexpected situations, and following the law will all be much easier if you have the right policies in place within your business. Things like your password hygiene rules come into this, but you have to think more broadly if you’re going to cover everything. You just need to create a set of rules that will make it very hard for cybersecurity threats to be caused by your team or internal practices.
Ongoing Education
You can find training courses that can give your team the right skills to deal with data protection and cybersecurity, building policies around the extensive lessons they learn. Looking at other companies and their policies can also help with this.
Maintaining proper cybersecurity can be hard in the modern world. Here at Direct Submit, we work extremely hard to protect our client’s data and are always happy to help if you’re concerned about issues like this within your own business. Digital threats will always be there, but you can manage them if you continue to maintain good cybersecurity rules and try to stay up to date and follow the above Small Business Cyber Security Guide.
