8 Essential Security Tips for Your Small Business

Crime is something businesses can’t ignore in today’s world. You don’t only have to worry about physical security threats anymore. You now also have the internet to worry about.

And when 2020 saw a record number of internet crime complaints, you can’t put off creating an internet security plan.

Luckily, there are many things you can do today to create a secure business. Use the eight security tips below to create a company security plan that works.

1. Use Access Control

Even if you put a lot of work into creating a robust security system, there’s still the chance that you’ll suffer from a breach. A lot of those breaches will happen with individual employees.

If an employee has access to everything your business has, your whole business gets compromised. Why do this when most employees only need access to a limited amount of information?

Put access control systems in place to control what individual employees can see and do in your business. That includes both digital files and server rooms in your office. An attacker won’t be able to see all your business information when they compromise one of your employees when you go this route.

2. Use Two-Factor Authentication

Strong passwords can do a lot to improve your business security. Unfortunately, they can only go so far. There are still other ways for hackers to compromise accounts that don’t involve stealing user passwords.

Two-factor authentication is for those situations. By adding two-factor authentication to your user accounts, you require a secondary code for login. Those codes get sent to someone’s personal device.

The most common ways to do this are with text messages, emails, and authentication applications. That means hackers can’t access accounts without access to the device that gets this code.

3. Install Security Cameras and Locks

Unfortunately, cybercrime isn’t your only security concern in your business. The chances are good that you have a physical location.

It doesn’t matter if you aren’t a retail store either. You still have security concerns for your business if anyone can walk into your office and have free reign.

Physical security is a must if you want to secure your company. Anyone can walk into an unlocked office, get on a computer system, and access data. Install locks and security cameras in your office to control and see everyone who tries to access your business location.

4. Install a Web Firewall

It’s not enough to install firewalls on individual computers at a business location. They do a lot to protect those computers, but it’s hard to get complete control over your business network when doing this.

It makes more sense for businesses to use a hardware firewall that sits in front of all web traffic in your business. These devices will monitor all the traffic on your network and control what happens. They have threat databases that make detecting and stopping threats easy before they become more significant problems.

On top of that, you can set content restrictions on your network that stop employees from going to untrustworthy websites. That will reduce the chances of people downloading malicious files and compromising your computer systems.

5. Do Regular Backups

Securing a business network is more than protecting yourself against hackers. If you want to take data protection seriously, you must protect yourself in data loss cases.

Hardware failure is still possible, even though computer hardware has improved. It’s also common for employees to accidentally delete files on your network. You won’t be able to restore your data without a system backup.

Regularly backup all your critical business files. You’ll be able to restore information with a few clicks from a cloud backup solution when you face these issues.

6. Protect Yourself From Malware

Even if you have protections that prevent employees from going to shady websites, that doesn’t mean you’re entirely safe. You may occasionally miss a bad neighborhood online or receive malicious emails. If an employee opens a bad file from one of those sources, you’ll end up with malware on your computer network.

Anti-malware software will stop this from happening. This software will scan your file downloads and quarantine them if something looks wrong. You can then look in your quarantine section of the program and remove the file or restore it if it appears safe.

7. Avoid Phishing

Technical cyber threats aren’t your only concern when creating a company security plan. Some hackers take a social engineering approach to compromise companies.

Phishing is one of the most common ways attackers do this. An attacker will pretend to be a representative from a company your business works with and convinces employees to hand over sensitive information. Hackers then use this information to compromise accounts and gain access to data.

You’ll need to train your team to spot these attempts. You can also invest in phone fraud prevention services to identify scam calls before someone answers them.

8. Get an Audit

Using all the best security practices will get you far when trying to protect information. But it isn’t always enough to completely secure your business.

It’s easy to make small mistakes when securing your company. That’s all it takes for a hacker to take advantage of the situation and compromise your business.

Get a security audit from a professional company to ensure you didn’t miss anything. If a security audit does expose issues, your auditor can help you create a plan to fix the problems and fortify your business against attacks.

Continue Learning Security Tips in the Future

The threat of business cybercrime is increasing by the year. Unless you do everything possible to take data security seriously, you’ll leave your business open for attack.

Luckily, you can use countless security tips to keep your company safe. Keep learning about future threats to ensure you’re prepared for what’s coming.

Head back to the blog to find more tech tips that will help your company succeed.