Are you a small business owner? One of your biggest concerns is most likely keeping all of your company information safe and secure. A data breach can trigger a widespread effect that can cost you hundreds, even thousands of dollars in damage. Your customers and clients rely on you to keep their account information secure at all times. Here are a few ways that you can help protect informational data without having to spend thousands on a new IT security team.
Conduct A Complete Security Audit
One of the best things you can do to see where you initially stand with your company’s security checkpoints is to run a basic security audit. If you have an IT specialist who handles all of your online security tools, it can be as simple as having them run routine checks on a daily or weekly basis to check for security breaches or intrusion issues. If not, a basic rule of thumb for you would be:
- *Install a good anti-virus program and run routine diagnostics on your entire server and all of the computers in the building.
- *Make sure your entire server and individual laptops and computers have a firewall protection program.
- *Update your software regularly to patch sudden security issues.
- *Have a generalized security software system in place to alert you or IT when information has been shared or breached by an unauthorized user or outside source.
Hiring a company like Califorensics, who specializes in network security and digital forensics to take on all business security measures is vital in catching a potential privacy breach. If that’s not in your budget, educate yourself on how to protect your company’s data on your own.
Protect All Remote Operators
If your sales team or service contractors are out on the open road every day it’s important to keep their information safe. Emails, cloud servers, texting and mobile apps are vulnerable to scammers and those trying to steal information. Make sure that all mobile devices that access your company’s information are safe and secure. You can do this by also downloading the same encrypted software on mobile devices. This can prevent remote data access to unauthorized users or anyone else who may have access to your employees’ phones.
Passwords And Encryption
It happens every day in the workplace, one worker quickly gaining access to another user’s computer or laptop to send a message or access personal business information. While it may seem harmless in the moment, it goes to show how quickly sensitive information can be obtained or edited by someone who doesn’t have proper authorization. Hold a staff meeting to remind employees how to recognize an unsafe email and keep all devices password protected. This helps curb a possible unauthorized security breach while keeping security expenditures down. It’s important to periodically check everyone’s passwords to make sure that they are up to date and if they need to be changed to do so in specific increments. Another thing to consider is the removal of old phones and laptops. Are they just sent to a computer store for disposal or are they stripped of vital customer information before they leave the premises? Making sure important customer and client databases as well as any health records, are wiped clean is important to long-term security.
Create An Extensive Backup System
One of the biggest things you can do to prevent a safety tech disaster is to have everything backed up on a reliable and secure server. This is something that will save a huge disaster from becoming a widespread catastrophe. It will secure all of your company information and save it to a main drive or server. That way if you have a widespread virus that attacks the system or attaches to one computer, you can replace all of the information once the problem has been repaired. Be sure to update your backup server and provide system updates on a frequent basis. The most important task regarding IT system security is to provide frequent updates to your main server, this will keep it working and securing your data at all times.
Keeping company information safe and secure is an important task. It takes a widespread company effort to prevent a breach from occurring. This provides safety and security and a system that you can be proud to show off to potential clients, in hopes that they’ll pick you over a competitor to keep their info secure.