Online hacking is becoming an increasingly difficult problem for businesses large and small. Many small business owners have lost data and money as a result of cyber-crime, so you need to do all you can to protect your data and your customer’s personal information.
It is not only the loss of data or earnings that are problematic. A company’s reputation and level of trust with the customers can also be hurt. Here are a few tips to making your business more secure.
Risk Assess Data
You will probably have a significant amount of data stored on your computer systems, such as customer data, employment records, and supplier details. All of this has to be assessed to see if you are handling it correctly.
When you are looking at some of the information, ask yourself, what would happen if this data was compromised? Think about where you store this information and is it adequate for the type of data it is. Do the people who have access to the data, need to have it?
It is these types of questions that will give you some idea what data you have and how you should be dealing with it day to day.
Moving your data to the cloud
One of the ways you can secure your data easily is by getting your information uploaded to the cloud by a hosting firm. Companies such as umbeehosting.net can take all your data, including personal information, and transfer it to their servers. This is a far more secure way of dealing with your data, and it has many other advantages such as flexibility and cost effectiveness.
Then, you can have a remote desktop system for all your employees, and only allow access to those who need to see it. It also provides workers that are out of the office, a secure way to access the company data.
Passwords
Passwords can be difficult to manage sometimes, particularly if your workforce are not entirely secure with their passwords. Some may have their passwords written on post-its, others in a Word document. You can always employ help from a password manager tool that can help you keep all your passwords safe.
You then have the power to revoke passwords and generate new ones as needed. This will hopefully make your computers more secure and stop employees from divulging their passwords or leaving them unguarded by mistake.
Education
An important part of keeping your data safe is teaching people how to secure data properly. A small amount of training can go a long way to stopping potential breaches and maybe even prevent data being lost on memory sticks or laptops.
There are guides and videos on the internet that can help you to train your staff in the best practices of data protection. It also means that if there were a breach, you know that everything was done to try and prevent it from happening.
Protecting your information is a big responsibility. You are not only responsible for your data, but also for your customers and your employees. With these tips, you can move toward a more secure computer system that will hopefully protect your company from cyber-crime.
