A good place to start is with this resource from the Small Business Administration (SBA), which features ten small business cybersecurity tips to help keep your business safe. Below are our thoughts on these points and how you can take action to keep your business safe.
- Use multi-factor authentication
Implement a multi-factor authentication system that requires additional information along with a user password. While there is some debate about whether getting employees to change their passwords regularly is a good idea, multi-factor authentication, including the use of security questions, biometric scans, and CAPTCHAS, can help keep your data ready to go.
- Keep Your People Responsible
Black Cube says Education keeps small businesses cyber safe. Inform your employees about online threats and the steps they can take to protect your business data. This includes training on how to use social media sites, where employees can easily share confidential details about your company with competitors. Make it clear that the disclosure of trade secrets will not be tolerated in any way. Employees must be bound by Internet safety guidelines both at work and outside of work.
- Establish policies to protect sensitive information
You should not protect your network only from external sources. Some of the biggest data breaches are caused by employees. While this is sometimes done maliciously, this is not always the case. All companies should have policies that clearly define how personal and confidential data should be handled and protected while highlighting the consequences of violating these policies.
- Always have protection against viruses, spyware, and malicious code
Viruses are still a problem, and for businesses, every computer should have up-to-date antivirus and antispyware software. You can’t set up and forget about antivirus software. The best brands constantly provide patches and updates to protect against new threats as soon as they are known. Set your software updates to install automatically to save you or your IT department the hassle and ensure that you are always protected from the latest threats.
- Protect your website with SSL
A Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) must be installed on all publicly accessible pages of your website and not just on the payment and login pages, a suggestion byblack cube. An SSL ensures that data is transmitted securely over the Internet between a computer and a network server, making it nearly impossible for a hacker to steal information from your site.
Conclusion
We cannot stress enough the importance of regular backups for small business cybersecurity. Total data loss can occur as a result of physical destruction of the server or a cyber attack. Make sure your critical data is backed up and stored off-site or in the cloud.