It’s easy to feel as though you’ll never be targeted by the kinds of malicious online attacks that you hear about, but when you’re in business, you’re just as much a target as anyone else.
This is also true in a personal sense, but the nature of these threats and how you protect yourself is slightly different in business due to the various arms of your company that you have to be mindful of.
Learning how to stay safe is something that doesn’t take much time, but it can save you an incredible amount of hassle further down the line, easily making it a wiser choice than assuming you’ll never need it.
Simple Safety
First of all, try to familiarize yourself and your team with some ways that your business can stay safe without needing to invest in any improvements.
These investments are important, but they might not necessarily be enough without the right attitude and knowledge.
A baseline of knowledge can prevent you from falling into complacency, and keeps you on your toes, aware of what might be suspicious and what isn’t to be trusted.
Basic online safety training is something that you can engage your whole team in, and you can run a regular training program to include information on more recent scams.
Email scams where untrustworthy links are clicked on due to a lack of awareness of how to identify suspicious communications are often where this occurs.
Identify Relevant Systems
Getting better security is generally good advice, but the lack of specifics might only illustrate just how many options businesses in your position actually have.
There are a number of broad security systems that can help to keep your network safe, but the more modern versions that might be equipped with cloud technology to consistently update your defenses are likely to cost more, meaning the question of resources has to be asked.
What’s more, you might want to also equip yourself with the proper security measures that different aspects of your business require.
If you use APIs, for instance, you’re going to want to make sure that you restrict unauthorized access through API security solutions, and the same might be true when it comes to your intranet portal.
Be Discerning
What can make this issue more difficult might be that the threats you’re up against are only becoming more sophisticated with time.
While some scams might be easy to spot due to how their communications are structured, others might manage to hack email addresses that are more familiar to you and display a more convincing message.
This might then make the approach of following simple rules to identify a threat less useful.
In this instance, you might find that you have to apply a critical lens to the content itself—is what they’re asking of you normal for this person?
Does it relate to finances or other sensitive information? If so, you might find it worth at least notifying other members of your team, including IT or security-focused employees, so you can develop a sense of where to go from here.
Passwords
In both personal and professional contexts, it’s becoming more normal to have multiple different accounts or websites that you need passwords to access.
This can lead to a couple of outcomes; one might be that you’re reusing the same passwords again and again, meaning that you become increasingly at risk of having these passwords cracked and becoming hacked.
On the other hand, if you create a different password for each situation, then you might end up forgetting them, or having weaker passwords in some situations that leave you more vulnerable.
In business, this problem is again magnified due to the fact that you have multiple staff members sharing the same problem.
Password managers might then become worthy of your attention, allowing you to create passwords that are more difficult to guess, and also store them all on a secure platform that can make them easily retrievable.
Backing Up
Losing all your data at once is a fear that you might have, and it could lead you to the solution of backing up your data in the cloud.
Some people might avoid this solution due to how they might perceive it as opening them up to further vulnerabilities, since this then makes the same data more generally accessible.
Cloud technology is trusted for these same purposes by businesses in all kinds of industries, meaning that it’s worth your time to properly understand how secure the right networks can be.
Physical backups can be useful as well, but when that’s all you’re relying on, you’re not only exposed to online threats, but physical damage or unexpected issues in your office or with the storage devices themselves could lead to a disastrous outcome, making it important to diversifying your options.
