When you run a business, regardless of size, it’s essential that you take the proper methods to secure all assets and company data. Without securing the data, you’re going to risk a breach occurring, which leads to loss of data and could also mean that you risk the company’s reputation and the relationships you’ve built with your customer base.
Taking these measures seriously will keep you from facing penalties that are imposed for compliance reasons and help you continue conducting the business you’ve built each day. We encourage you to read on and learn about cybersecurity measures you need to put in place for your small business.
Read on now.
Ensure Employees Are Well Trained
When it comes to the first thing you need to do when taking cybersecurity measures for your company you need to train your employees. This includes compliance training from Bob’s Business to ensure that employees are up-to-date on all policies and regulations they are meant to follow while working. The training you provide to employees should be ongoing.
This will provide employees with refresher courses on the things they need to know and do in terms of cybersecurity. You should also take steps to establish routine practices that they have to follow, including ensuring they understand the consequences of not following the policies you’ve set in place.
It helps if you run through potential cybersecurity situations that could arise. During each situation, help employees learn more about the potential risks that come from these situations if they don’t act quickly and the steps they need to take to act.
This will help them put what they’ve used into practice because during a cybersecurity breach, time is of the essence, and if you want to ensure that data is protected, your staff will need to act as soon as possible.
Protect Your Security Network
Because part of your job is protecting the data you’re collecting, you need to ensure you do what it takes to protect the security network. This not only means the Wi-Fi that’s being used by your employees to log in, but you need to also take steps to protect the computers, networks, and other security access points being used.
It’s best if you utilize one cloud source for all data to be transferred to and stored at the end of each day. This will give you peace of mind that everything is going to one central location instead of multiple locations, which means more transfers are taking place, which could lead to a hole in your security at some point.
The network you use should also be backed up by software that protects your system from malware and other viruses that are trying to infiltrate the system.
Create Copies of Business Data
It’s essential if you back up data on a regular basis to ensure nothing gets buried or accidentally deleted. There are several pieces of data that need to be backed up and protected by the network at all times, which include, but aren’t limited to, electronic spreadsheets and other financial files.
If you can, the system you use to back up data should work automatically because, in the hustle and bustle of the day, it’s easy for people to forget to back up the data. This, like other things, can cause weaknesses in your security system that lead to a loss of data that you are tasked with protecting.
Not to mention, when you need to reference these documents, you’re going to want to know exactly where you can find them. The best place to find them will be on the cloud network, where you’ve stored copies of all data collected.
Limit Employee Data Access
There is no reason for people to have access to every part of your network. Therefore, if you want to look into further security measures within your system, you need to only provide access to certain areas of the data systems and limit them only to employees that need to use them.
People should only have access to parts of the networks that they need to use when doing their jobs. It also means that these employees aren’t able to install additional software to their computer system without permission ahead of time. When you provide passwords to these areas of access, you need to ensure they don’t give out the passwords to anyone else.
They should also have to deal with multiple stages of authentication. These levels of authentication will require additional information before a person is allowed entrance to the information they’re accessing. If a hacker is trying to infiltrate the system, multifactor authentication will give you more time to react the moment you notice they are trying to get through the system.
It’s also useful to have all passwords reset every thirty days. This will require that before employees are given access to the system again, they will need to take the steps by resetting the password.
Use Encryption Software
This type of software is especially useful when collecting information about finances, such as client bank accounts or social security numbers. The encryption software will add an extra layer of security by changing the information you’re collecting and transforming it into code that is hard for people to understand.
If the system is infiltrated, the encryption software will make things significantly challenging for a hacker to determine what they’re looking at.
Cybersecurity Measures to Use in Your Small Business
There are several cybersecurity measures that can be used to help support your small business. One is using the right software programs to protect your security network, or it could mean taking time to ensure that all employees are trained and up to date on the most recent security policies and procedures to handle situations in case they occur.
The measures you take today for your business will matter more as you move forward with protecting your tomorrow. Check out some of the other posts in our blog for tons of useful cybersecurity measures and topics you don’t want to miss out on.
