If you are thinking about what you can do to ensure that your business is as protected as possible, it’s going to be important that you are approaching it from a number of angles at the same time. The fact is that this is going to be a really vital way to approach it on the whole. In particular, one area that will be necessary to focus on will be the digital side of things, and in this post we are going to take a look at that in particular.
Here are some of the main ways you can hope to digitally protect your business. As you will soon see, this also turns out to be a good way to protect your customers as well, so it really is a win-win for everyone.
Start With The Basics
If you want to keep your business and your customers protected in a digital sense, then you will first need to start with the basics. That means making sure that you are using strong passwords, and that you are following and enforcing multi-factor authentication wherever possible and necessary. This is a much-needed extra layer which just makes it so much harder for unauthorized users to gain access, even if they do happen to successfully steal a password. As such, it’s one of the simplest and most direct ways to protect yourself digitally.
For this, you might want to consider using a password manager, to help avoid the nightmare of remembering complex logins. This can be a really useful approach which makes it easy as well as secure for your business, so that is certainly something you will want to think about.
Keep Your Software Updated
It’s vital that all software is kept updated at all times, as this is a really simple and yet powerful way to ensure you are going to keep your business protected as well as you can. Every device, app or server you use has vulnerabilities. Software vendors are constantly releasing updates to patch these holes, so if you are skipping those updates you are essentially giving attackers a free ride on your apps.
It’s particularly important that you are updating operating systems as a whole, as well as antivirus software and web browsers. You should also pay careful attention to third-party apps, and try to ensure that you are doing all you can to make these as secure as possible too. If you can do that, it’s going to mean that you are much more likely to have a control on things, and that is especially important if those apps handle customer data or payments. All in all, keeping your software updated is a really simple and powerful way to ensure that you are protecting your business digitally as well as you can.
Back Everything Up Regularly
We all know that we should be backing up, but it’s one thing to know it and quite another to actually put that into practice. However, it’s important – if ransomware were to hit or your server were to crash, a recent backup could be the difference between full recovery and a complete meltdown. This could affect your business significantly for a long time, so it’s something that you really do need to be aware of if you are going to make the most of it.
As such, it’s vital that you are automating daily backups and that you store them in a secure place offsite, such as with cloud services for instance. This is going to make a huge difference. You should also test the backups occasionally to make sure they are actually working as necessary.
Take Care With Emails
One of the main sensitive points, and points of entry for people wanting to break into your business digitally, is email. This is something that can be particularly hard to keep on top of and control across an organization, partly because it requires impeccable training with your employees and you will need to make sure that you are keeping on top of that as well as you can. There are a number of things you can do to help protect yourself against email issues such as phishing, however.
One of the most powerful of these is to use DMARC reporting so that you have enterprise-grade features for being able to authenticate emails. This is a hugely powerful across the board approach that really makes a difference. On top of that, good training for your staff is essential and can help to fill in the gaps. As long as you are taking care with emails, you should find that you are going to have a much better approach to digitally protecting your business.
Train Your Team
In fact, that point about training employees is also something that goes across the board too, and you should make sure that you are doing all you can to be able to approach this right. Very often, your employees can be your strongest defense, but they are also capable of being your biggest liability. The difference between these two situations is training. If you are not training them effectively, you are going to find that you end up with cyberattacks that could easily have been avoided, so this is something that you should be aware of and be keen to override through good and regular training.
Make sure that you keep up to date with this and it will really make a world of difference.
Secure Your Devices
Of course, along with all of this you should also ensure you are securing your devices as well as possible. If you can do that, you are going to have a much better approach to your digital protection, and your business is going to benefit. It’s amazing what a difference a simple thing like this can really make, and you are going to find it’s really worth thinking about for sure.
