It seems a week doesn’t go by where there isn’t a big news story about a new security vulnerability or data breach. With all of the bad guys out there trying to compromise your company and your website, how can you ever keep up? While it may not be possible to ever be 100% secure, if you follow these steps you’ll be better off than most at small business security.
7 Steps to Keep Your Small Business Secure
1. Virus and malware protection
While this may seem like a no-brainer for the computer you use every day for your work, most don’t think to have someone verify that their website hasn’t been compromised. This is especially important for ecommerce sites where you will be collecting payment information. McAfee Secure is one option for this. They offer a free service for low-volume websites, and a reasonable subscription for bigger sites.
2. Manage risk
Cyber criminals may use small businesses as a way to get to larger corporations with whom they have an association. Target’s major data breach was a result of bad security from an HVAC vendor they used. Consider the type of customer information you save and what the consequences would be if that were stolen. You don’t want to ruin any customer or B2B relationships as a result of cyber criminals threatening your small business security.
3. Download and install software updates
Software updates not only fix bugs and add new features, but they also correct security problems. A best practice is to enable automatic installation of all security updates for all devices you use for work. It is probably a good idea to automatically update any other devices as well, because small business owners tend to use whatever device is closest when something comes up.
4. Provide security for physical access to computers
You can have a security system or secure and lock up your laptops and electronics. Make sure your personal and professional laptops are password protected and/or have encryption enabled. Depending on the type of information you save to your hard drive (e.g. customers’ personal information), you need to secure that data so that even if your laptops are stolen, the criminals would not be able to access that information.
5. Back up your data
It is essential that you back up your data regularly, and ideally have it set up to automatically back up to prevent losing any recent files you haven’t had a chance to back up. Most of us have run into an issue at some point in our lives when a technical failure has caused us to lose important data. If you keep your data backed up, you will mitigate any issues these failures could cause you. Depending on your needs and level of security required, you can either back up your files to a cloud service or use an external backup drive.
6. Secure your internal network
One of the largest gaps in small business security is the internal network. Due to budget constraints, a lot of small businesses use off the shelf network equipment and set it up themselves. There’s nothing wrong with doing this, as long as you don’t keep all of the default passwords. Just by changing the default username and password on your network equipment (cable modem, wireless router, etc.) you greatly improve your security and help prevent anyone outside your business from getting in.
7. Website security
If you are handling secure data (payment details, personal information, etc.) on your website, then you need to be sure you have the best security possible. It doesn’t take much to get a strong SSL certificate for your website – most web hosting companies will set it up for you for a small fee. But what it gains you is peace of mind for yourself and your customers knowing you care about the security of their sensitive information.
Make sure you take the time to evaluate your small business security and make any changes you need to keep yourself and your business protected.