Not having a cyber secure business poses a substantial risk to your employees, customers, and company’s success. Thankfully, there are several simple steps in ensuring that your business is and remains cyber secure.
1- Identify Business Risks
Your business is a target for cyber-attacks. To identify the risk level to your business from cyber-threats, consider the following: What do you have that people want? Once you know what people want from you, think about where these items are located and how they are accessed. This information will help you identify where there could be vulnerabilities and keep your business cyber secure.
2- Train Employees on Cyber Security
Provide training to your staff as a way of protecting company data. If you have an outside firm managing your IT, make sure they provide security awareness training for all employees. This should include practical steps the entire workforce needs to know to help protect company systems from being breached or hacked.
Hackers and cybercriminals often exploit human weaknesses, such as hoping employees will open an infected email attachment. Employees need to be trained not to click links in emails and always check the sender before opening any attachments.
3- Use strong passwords, but don’t reuse them
The use of weak passwords is a serious security issue. Even if you’re targeted by sophisticated cybercriminals, there’s still no reason they should be able to gain access to your system because of a weak password that can easily be guessed or cracked. It’s important to ensure all the passwords used by employees and administrators are complex and strong.
4- Ensure You’re PCI Compliant
You need to ensure that all technology that processes or stores credit card data is compliant with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). This standard specifies how businesses handle, process, store or transmit cardholder information. Many small businesses that accept credit cards are confused about the rules, but it’s essential to understand these regulations and make sure you’re protecting your customers’ payment details.
Conclusion Cyber security is a risk for any business, whether large or small. By teaching employees to be vigilant on security and taking steps to protect company information, businesses can successfully reduce the risk of cyberattacks.
5- Protect Your Computer from Malware and Hackers
The first step is to protect your computers from malware, viruses, ransomware, and other common types of cyberattacks. It’s often the case that this type of attack is what leads to data loss.
If you’re using a Windows computer, protect it with an anti-virus program. If you’re using a Mac, use the built-in anti-virus protection included in macOS—however, if your business is particularly vulnerable to malware attacks or you suspect suspicious activity, Apple has security software available for purchase.
6- Protect Your Data
The next step to increase your business’s cyber security is to protect your data. How you do this will depend on how many computers, mobile devices, and employees you have and how much data there is.
If you have a lot of data, an external drive isn’t enough because if a virus or malware gets on one computer, it could spread to the drive and render all of the data unusable. If you have a small amount of data that needs to be shared between several computers or devices, consider an online backup solution.
Workplace keeps your critical business information safe and available by storing and synchronizing files and securely sharing them with authorized devices and people.
7- Backup Your Data
The final step to increasing your business’s cyber security is backing up your data. The best process for this will depend on the size of your business and how much data you have. It might take some trial and error before you find the right balance, but here are some suggestions to get you started:
Back up your computers and other devices onto an external drive. This can be done either through the manufacturer’s software or by using a third-party program like Apple’s Time Machine or Microsoft Windows Backup and Restore option.
Back up all necessary files to a server or cloud storage. You can do this by purchasing business data backup software that will automatically back up the files you select as frequently as possible.