9 Cybersecurity Tips for Small Businesses

Data breaches are all too common, and unfortunately, they’re only getting worse. In fact, since 2005, there have been an estimated 9,044 data breaches, affecting hundreds of millions of people and their records.

One single data breach can have devastating effects on the population, exposing credit card numbers, addresses, social security numbers, and more. Hackers can simply take advantage of flaws because they are widely accessible. Cybercriminals could steal your data, harm your brand, and cost you a lot of revenue through theft, data breaches, and planned extortion. You must hire professionals like Cmitsolutions to safeguard your business against hackers and provide a thorough plan for addressing any flaws before they become threats. Without interfering with your business activities, they will effectively implement defenses suited to your requirements.

Luckily, there are some simple steps you can take to improve your company’s security. Let’s talk about some cybersecurity tips for your small business.

Cybersecurity Tips: Know Why It Matters

The best way to protect your company’s data is to take it seriously. If you want to know how to keep a business safe, let’s start with why. You’ve likely seen on the news how devastating these cyber attacks have been recently, especially with the Colonial pipeline.

If you’re running a business, you’re carrying sensitive data that isn’t only relevant to your business, but also to your employees and your customers. If you have digital copies of employee files, there is a lot of sensitive information on there. If your customers pay with credit cards, or if you require other information like government IDs or social security numbers, this is vulnerable to theft.

Not only is this info critical to people, but businesses overall have a pretty bad track record of cybersecurity, as they just don’t care enough about it. In fact, it takes the average company 197 days to even notice that a breach told place. You then, as a business owner, have a responsibility to address all of your customers and tell them how and when it happened, which does not reflect well on your business. Naturally, they have multiple layers of security and privacy measures, including AES-256 encryption.

Secure Your WiFi

Securing your company’s WiFi is crucial. Having one that is unsecured for guests is fine but the WiFi that will be handling company data should be kept tightly secure. You shouldn’t even have to tell your employees the password, and just sign in to the company computers yourself.

An important thing to remember is that if people are going to use this WiFi on their phones, the phones have to be secured as well or they should use a separate guest WiFi.

Make Employees Change Their Passwords

If employees have company email accounts or their own login IDs to get onto your server, make their passwords expire. A good rule of thumb is to have them change their passwords every 60 days and make sure they do not store the new passwords on their phones if they are connected to the WiFi.

Back Up Everything

Backing up your data is so important, so read that again and again until you remember it. Any information that you’re afraid of losing needs to be backed up, or else once you lose it, it’s gone for good. Use an external hard drive for backup or a secured cloud service.

Encryption

Encryption and firewalls for everything that you can use them on. Any sensitive data needs to be encrypted, and a firewall needs to be placed on your network as soon as possible. There’s plenty of software available for these, so do your research and find the right one for your business!

Get Antivirus Software

If you weren’t already doing this, then that’s a problem that needs to be addressed right away. Every computer needs antivirus and malware protection, and there are plenty available for download.

Keep Software Up To Date

Yes, browser updates are annoying, but they really are important. They keep up to date with the latest viruses and malware and become resistant to them.

Hire IT Professionals

You can follow everything on here and more, but the truth is, nothing will compare to the services of an IT team. You don’t want to be one of the businesses that take over half a year to notice a breach or even let one happen in the first place. There really is no way around it. The best way to protect your company’s data is by hiring small business IT support. They can help you with red teaming, internal and external pen testing, application pen testing, cloud application security assessment, and other services. Whatever your company is and what it requires, cybersecurity experts have a solution.

Don’t Forget Physical Theft

It doesn’t have to be somebody from Russia hacking into your computer. In fact, that’s even less likely than somebody getting into the building and seeing the sticky note you have on your monitor with the network password (I’m talking to you).

While this isn’t what you think of when it comes to cybersecurity, it’s just as important that you lock your doors, don’t leave passwords out in the open, and do what you can to protect your hardware.

Make Sure Everyone Is On The Same Page

Employees, managers, IT teams, independent contractors, and business partners. Anybody who has access to this information needs to have the same level of knowledge and be on the same page as you. Uniformity is key to protecting the data, so make sure everybody follows the same standards.

You can make everything uniform by training your employees, having IT services specifically for your company, and setting uniform settings for everybody on the platform.

Don’t Skimp On Anything

Now that you know a few cybersecurity tips, just remember that you don’t want to compromise on anything. The things on this list are easy to follow, and they really are the bare minimum when it comes to securing a business.

Just do your best to protect your data, keep everyone up to date, and get the help you need to stay safe! Stay up to date on all of our latest tech news so you don’t fall behind!