You always wanted to be an entrepreneur and want to start your own business. That is why you ditch the traditional 9-5 job and opted for starting a small business. After succeeding in laying the groundwork for your business, you start to come across business challenges. Your passion helps you get over all those challenges and get your business off the ground.
As your business starts growing, it grabbed the attention of cybercriminals who launched a cybersecurity attack to compromise your sensitive data. It catches you off guard because you did not see it coming and hence have little to no cybersecurity measures and controls in place to protect against those threats.
You fail to recover from the effects of that cyberattack. The financial losses and reputation damage is enough to put you out of business. If you don’t want your small and mid-size businesses face the same fate, then it is important that you take cybersecurity seriously.
In this article, you will learn about seven cybersecurity tips that will help your small and mid-size businesses stay safe online.
1. Develop a Cybersecurity Culture
Small and mid-size businesses don’t have huge budgets as large scale enterprises. That is the reason why they can not afford top cybersecurity talent and expensive hardware and software to protect their business. Thankfully, SMBs can cope up with this challenge by developing a cybersecurity culture in their organization.
You should not only train the IT personnel they have but they can also increase awareness amongst your employees that cybersecurity is not the sole responsibility of IT department and every employee should play their part. The more aware your employees are the better because they can identify and report suspicious activities and don’t get fooled by hackers. Get the support of executives and employees and define roles and responsibilities for each employee and department.
2. Identify Critical Business Data
Businesses today store a ton of data. Some of them are critical while others are not so much. Identify critical business data, where it is stored and how it is accessed and managed. For instance, your critical business data consists of customer and vendor lists or financial information such as credit card details or bank account details of your customers. Let’s say, your critical business data is stored on an on premise server. Now, think about securing your critical business assets from security threats. You don’t need to focus on securing all the data but make sure to protect mission-critical data.
3. Keep Everything Up to Date
One of the biggest mistake small and mid-size business makes is that they continue using older hardware and software. These older versions of software and legacy systems has security vulnerabilities that can easily be exploited by hackers. To plug all the loopholes, it is important to keep everything up to date. Upgrade to newer, more efficient hardware and download and install the latest version of software and security patches. This will help you to iron out all the bugs and errors which can allow hackers an easy pass.
4. Be Proactive, Not Reactive
It is quite unfortunate to see most small and midsize businesses taking a reactive approach to cybersecurity. They wait for a cybersecurity attack to target their business before they can take the necessary steps. This approach makes them prone to cybersecurity attacks. What’s worse is that when you take the reactive approach, you are literally defenceless against sophisticated modern threats.
As a result, hackers can easily break into your systems and get away by stealing your data. It is highly recommended that you take the proactive approach to cybersecurity and conduct mock exercises and run simulations so you can identify loopholes in your current cybersecurity systems. You must have an incident response plan and DDoS protection ready when a cyberattack target your business so you know exactly what course of action you need to take to fix the issue.
5. Hire a Managed Security Provider
Small and mid-size businesses lack the type of resources you need to ensure optimum security. If your business is also facing a similar problem then, the best way to cope up with that is to outsource your IT operation and cybersecurity. There are managed security solution providers offering these fully managed services. This can not only reduce the burden off your IT team but also help them focus on more value-driven activities.
With so many of them around, choosing the right managed security solution provider is not easy. Find customers who have used their services and find out about their experiences. This will give you a better idea of what to expect from your managed security solution provider.
6. Use Safer Authentication Methods
We all know that passwords are not safe anymore. News of stolen passwords frequently makes headlines. This happens partly due to our callous behaviour and poor password practices. Most employees use the same, easy guess password for all their accounts, which makes the hacker’s job easy. Cybersecurity experts recommend that you ditch the passwords and switch to more secure biometric authentication methods such as fingerprint scanning and facial recognition. If you must use passwords, make sure to implement two-factor authentication. This will add a new layer of protection and keep your accounts safe.
7. Compliance, Standards and Certifications
There are numerous cybersecurity standards and certifications but SMBs should choose wisely. For instance, if your business is accepting a lot of credit card payments, then you should focus on getting PCI DSS certification. On the contrary, if you are storing and using user data, you should focus on being GDPR compliant.
Depending on the nature of business, you should pick a standard and certification that can help you build trust with your customers and they can perform transactions or give their data to your business without any fear. By complying with cybersecurity standards, you can project that your customer’s data is in safe hands.
How do you keep your small and mid-size business safe? Let us know in the comments section below.