Cybersecurity is a pressing concern for any business operating today. Without robust cybersecurity measures in place, your entire network and business will be vulnerable to attacks. Given how easy it is to get your hands on off-the-shelf hacking tools, attackers don’t need to be particularly skilled to try and attack your business.
The following simple tips will make your business network much safer, and defending it much easier.
Educate Everyone
The more you and your employees know about cybersecurity best practices and how to keep your most important bits of data safe, the less you have to worry about one of your workers inadvertently undermining your entire security system. All it takes is one person to not know that they’re about to do something that they shouldn’t to enable an attacker to bypass even the most sophisticated defenses.
We will talk about social engineering in more detail shortly, but social engineering is not the only way that an ill-informed worker can compromise your whole security setup. For example, less tech-savvy workers might not understand that an infected USB stick they bring in from home can end up infecting your entire system. Covering even the most basic cybersecurity topics with them can significantly reduce the potential threat they pose to your security.
It is also helpful to both you and your employees to understand the cybersecurity landscape that you are operating in. You can find some helpful cybersecurity infographics online that tell you a lot about the state of the industry today.
Beware Social Engineering
When most people think of hackers, they envisage someone sat in the dark typing furiously as they try to break through digital defenses. In reality, most hacking today isn’t done by attacking computers, but by attacking people. Why go to the trouble of trying to defeat a sophisticated cybersecurity system when you can simply ask a clueless employee to grant you access?
Social engineering attacks work because most businesses only have a relatively small number of employees who actually understand cybersecurity issues deeply enough to be able to reliably spot such an attack. You only need to teach your workers about a handful of social engineering tactics in order to effectively inoculate them against them.
Hire Expert Help
If you don’t feel as if you have the requisite knowledge and experience to keep your own networks safe in the long-run, you should consider bringing on board someone who does have the necessary expertise. You can’t put a price on data security, especially not with the threat of GDPR-related fines for any business that wants to operate in the EU. If you have any concerns about your business’s ability to fight back against cybersecurity threats, you should consider hiring a full-time cybersecurity specialist.
You can also engage the services of cybersecurity consultants on a short-term basis if this makes more sense for your current situation. For example, you could hire a security consultant to help you get your current procedures and policies up to scratch, then all you need to do is maintain the standard once they have left.
Backup Regularly
We should all back up our data much more frequently than we do. All of us understand the importance of ensuring that we back up important data whenever we have the opportunity, but many of us aren’t so good at actually putting that theory into practice. Even if your systems don’t come under attack from a cybercriminal, there is still plenty of scope for data to be lost or compromised in other ways.
Ensuring that you regularly make backups of your data will mean that if something does go wrong with your systems or networks, the damage will be minimal. Ideally, you should configure your systems so that backups are made routinely and automatically. That way, there’s no pressure on you to remember, and less chance of you forgetting.
Failing to properly secure your IT systems can have devastating consequences for a business, regardless of its size. If your business gets a reputation for playing it fast and loose with your customers’ personal data, the reputational hit can have a lasting impact on your ability to make money and attract new customers. Not only will poor data security make you less trustworthy in the eyes of your customers, but other businesses will also think twice before they share anything sensitive with you.
Investing in your cybersecurity is a solid investment in your business’s future. Your cybersecurity protocols will keep your data, your systems, and potentially even your workers, safe from outside threats. Protecting your systems doesn’t have to be a difficult undertaking; all you need to do is ensure that you and your workers understand some simple best practices.