10 Cybersecurity Tips to Keep Your Business Safe

If you’re like most businesses today, you collect a lot of information. This information contains sensitive data about your customers, business partners, and company. The question is, are you doing enough to keep that data safe?

Believe it or not, cybercrime costs the world $600 billion every year. If you don’t do enough to protect your company online, you’re putting your company at risk.

The good news is that you can use many cybersecurity tips to improve your company’s IT services. Below are 10 of the best business cybersecurity advice you’ll find on the internet.

1. Purchase a Hardware Firewall

It isn’t always enough to have software firewalls on each individual company computer. If you want a secure business network to protect small business data, you need insight into all internet traffic going in and out of your business.

A hardware firewall provides that insight. It sits in front of your computer network to monitor all internet traffic. You can see your traffic sources, outgoing traffic, and potential threats attacking your company.

A firewall works well because it has a threat database to block ongoing threats. Software firewalls may not be enough to stop this from happening.

On top of that, you can limit internet browsing with firewalls. If you want to stop employees from visiting shady websites, you can set a blocklist on your firewall to only allow trusted websites.

2. Use Two-Factor Authentication Everywhere

Complex passwords are only the first step to a great authentication system. While password requirements make it unlikely for hackers to crack passwords, it can still happen. There are many ways to steal password data without getting personal information from unsuspecting users.

If this does happen, two-factor authentication (2FA) will help stop hackers from compromising accounts. Whenever you access a 2FA account with a password, you get a secondary code sent to a personal device.

In most cases, you’ll receive a text message, email, or code from an authentication app on your phone.

Even if you have a password, not having the secondary code means you can’t access a company account. This extra layer of security is enough to prevent issues.

3. Create Multiple Wi-Fi Networks

A Wi-Fi network is a perfect way to compromise your internal computer systems. Many businesses only set up one network and give everyone access to it. That includes both employees and guests.

The problem is that you can’t control the devices that access your Wi-Fi network. Someone can have malicious software on their device and compromise your internal systems.

That isn’t as much of an issue if you create several Wi-Fi networks. Separate your internal infrastructure, employee network, and guest network. You limit the risk to other systems if one network gets compromised when you do this.

Your sensitive internal systems will remain safe in most cases, which means you won’t suffer from a severe data breach.

4. Create a Backup Strategy

Cybercriminals aren’t your only worry when trying to protect small business data. Computer equipment doesn’t last forever, and employees make mistakes. There’s always the risk of accidentally losing data and being unable to get it back.

If you don’t have a backup copy of your data, your business can get shut down and lose productivity. You’ll need to rebuild your data sources from scratch to get back to running at full capacity.

Your backup strategy will protect you in this situation. Come up with a backup schedule to create copies of your most important documents and data. Once you determine how often you’ll back up your data, you’ll store your backups at a physical location off-site or in the cloud. 

Most companies go the cloud route these days. In most cases, you can restore your lost data quickly with a few clicks on a website.

5. Use Malware Protection

Your hardware firewall can protect you from many threats, but it isn’t foolproof. Newer threats don’t immediately make their way to the firewall database. That means your employees can still end up downloading malicious software to their computers.

Virus and malware protection programs will help keep your computers clean. They have unique malware and virus databases that can detect the known malicious programs on the internet.

Even if malware does make it onto your machines, your malware protection program can run regular scans to look for the problem. As long as you keep your malware definitions up to date, you’ll have a lot of protection on every computer.

6. Encrypt Data at Rest

You can’t get around needing unencrypted data when people need to read data. Most people don’t want to deal with encryption programs to decode information. That adds extra strain to your employees and causes them to be less unproductive.

However, that doesn’t mean you should allow data to stay unencrypted when people aren’t using it. If data is resting on a server, ensure you have encryption enabled.

The software you use should have no problem decoding your data when people need it. That means your data stays safe on your servers and is still accessible for the people who need it.

7. Use a VPN

If you’re like many businesses today, you probably have employees that want to work at home or somewhere else in the world. While this is a great perk to offer, it does come with risks.

You’re relying on a secure home connection and Wi-Fi if your employees work remotely. Unfortunately, that’s a significant security issue.

You can secure your remote employees’ connections by requiring a VPN for company work. A VPN encrypts all incoming and outgoing internet traffic on a device. If someone is snooping on your employee’s traffic, they can’t see what’s going on.

Many hardware firewalls have a VPN built-in, so make sure to look carefully at your options. If you don’t have a firewall VPN, many stand-alone products can handle the job.

8. Offer Employee Training

Unfortunately, employees are often one of the weakest parts of internet security. You can have the best tools in the industry and still fall victim to cybercrime because part of your team made a mistake.

That’s why it’s critical to have security training for employees on what to do and not to do on the internet. You can do this in a couple of ways.

The first is to invest in educational material online that covers internet security. There are countless courses that will teach people how to keep a watchful eye online.

The other is to offer in-person training. You hire a security expert to hold classes in the office. People will need to attend these sessions to qualify for computer usage.

Once you have a training program set up, make it a requirement for your current and new team members.

9. Limit Employee Data Access

Even if you provide training to your employees, that doesn’t mean they’ll never make mistakes. It only takes on slipup to create a security breach. It’s a problem if that breach is from an employee who has access to all your company’s sensitive information.

If you want to limit data breaches, it’s essential to limit the amount of data every employee can access. Ideally, nobody should have access to more information than they need to handle their jobs.

Luckily, this should be easy to do with software. Every employee has a user account at your organization, which means you can limit access to specific files and folders.

Going this route will limit the scope of a data breach and help you shut down the breach more quickly.

10. Get Expert Help

You don’t know what you don’t know when it comes to cybersecurity. Even if you implement every cybersecurity tips you find, it still may not be enough to protect your business. It only takes one minor mistake to compromise your data.

That’s where security specialists help. You don’t have to hire someone full-time for the job. You can work with an IT security company to gain business protection.

Cybersecurity companies can offer everything from ongoing help to security audits. Even if you have an IT team in-house, working with a company like Usitservices.com is a great way to get verification that your company has enough protection against cybercrime.

Don’t Put Off Using These Cybersecurity Tips

It’s hard to avoid using the internet in business in today’s connected world. You need to use digital tools to be more productive and reach your customers. Don’t put off using the cybersecurity tips above in place to keep your company and employees safe when they use the internet.

Are you looking to take advantage of every IT tool you can to improve your company’s productivity? Check out the blog to find more IT tech you can use to help improve your company’s productivity.