These days, cybersecurity is often front and center in the media, both in the mainstream press and in trade publications. Good cybersecurity, however, starts with good physical security.
There’s no point in securing your computers against hackers if an intruder can physically enter your premises and do whatever they want. It’s also important to remember that even in the 21st century, people still make physical attacks on commercial premises for a variety of reasons from making political statements to plain old-fashioned robbery.
For all these reasons (and many more), it’s vital that business owners take steps to keep their commercial premises secure. With that in mind, Adrian Rickersey from Newgate shares his three tips to help.
Carry Out a Risk Assessment
Once you have undertaken your own risk assessment, you may want to bring in outside help from an expert. Local law enforcement may be able to assist, either by giving advice themselves or by referring you to someone with proven security expertise.
Alternatively, you may be able to get recommendations from people you know or look online. Whatever approach you use, the simple fact of the matter is that you need to know what the risks are before you can deal with them.
Create, Document, and Communicate Robust Security Policies
If you’ve been taking a lax attitude to security, then you can hardly expect your staff to change their behavior towards security policies overnight, especially if they have no idea what changes are expected of them.
Once you’ve decided what needs to happen, you need to document it so that there is a clear, complete and concise record of your (new) security protocols and then you need to communicate these to your staff and keep communicating them until the message has been absorbed.
Pro tip – If you do have rules in place, but they’re currently being ignored, you cannot reasonably start enforcing them without warning.
In the interest of fairness (and holding on to good staff), you need to make staff aware that as of a certain date, you will start really enforcing the rules they should have been following all along, ask them for feedback and actually listen to it.
This will allow you to discover the reasons why your rules are currently being ignored and take action to remedy the situation.
Bring Your Physical Defenses into the 21st Century
A chain is only as strong as its weakest link and a business is only as secure as its weakest point of entry. At this point in time, possibly the single, biggest vulnerability for smaller businesses is a continued reliance on traditional locks and keys.
These may be fine for many private homes (although even private homes are now starting to move towards digital locks), but they create all kinds of issues for businesses, most of which revolve around the fact that it is surprisingly difficult to keep effective track of physical keys, added to the fact that changing a physical lock can be a fairly major (and expensive) undertaking businesses understandably prefer to avoid as much as possible.
Switching to barriers which support digital access methods, such as codes and smart cards, offers all kinds of advantages, not least of which being the ability to control exactly who can go exactly where (and when) along with the ability to make changes quickly and, if necessary, without warning.
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