As you may have already realized, an online presence for your business can either catapult it to the top or lead to its closure altogether. The success of your online strategy will depend largely on the cybersecurity measures that you institute. This article highlights crucial tips that will keep your business secure online.
Threats Associated with Online Presence
When you decide to start a website, create social platforms, or use an app for your business, you should ensure that you perform a risk assessment to define the threats clearly. Some of the common online threats include malware, ransomware, hackers, phishing, viruses, and trojans.
The implementers of these threats have different motives, including illegally obtaining private data, destroying your important files, soliciting monetary benefits from your business, and instituting unethical competition against your business.
As such, you should always devise techniques that will help you in protecting all the information that you share online. If you have no expertise in the field, it’s advisable that you hire a professional to establish security measures for all your online platforms.
Measures to Protect Your Business from Online Threats
There are myriad methods you can use to protect your data from being accessed by malicious individuals. They include:
Always Secure Your Password
A password is a code that allows you to access your online platforms. You should never share it with anybody else, since that will create loopholes for leakage.
Also, you should realize that hackers use words and letters combination to guess your password. As such, ensure that you make it extremely difficult for anybody to guess it. You’ll achieve this by using a strong password with the following features:
- Adequate length (preferably not less than eight characters)
- A perfect combination of letters, symbols, and numbers. It’s recommended that you mix upper- and lower-case letters
- Change your passwords frequently
Never Use Public Internet
Hackers have perfected their game, and they can phish your details when you use public internet. While you may think that the internet from your favorite coffee shop is a blessing, it could turn out to be the worst thing to ever happen to your business!
If you must use the public internet, you should not log into your accounts containing sensitive information. If you do, then you should change the passwords and other details immediately after you leave the place. However, you can be confident that you’ll not outwit the hackers for long! The best way is NEVER to use the public internet to log into sensitive accounts.
Business Segmentation
You need to divide your business into departments. Even if it’s a sole proprietorship, ensure that you only use one computer to access your sensitive accounts. Avoid using your friend’s laptop or any other form of computer sharing.
If you have employees, you need only to allow authorized access to sensitive data. All the computers in the department should be equipped with the necessary security features including firewall, two-step authentication process, encryption, and a high-level password system.
When you segment your business, you make it easy to have centralized operations, which enable quick detection of threats and effective mitigation measures.
Establish a Binding Code of Ethics
When you’re dealing with employees, you need to make it clear on what they can share online. You should develop a document to guide their operations and enumerate all the company’s confidential information that should never be shared with the outsiders.
This guarantees that your employees will not be a party to leakages that may expose your data to malicious activities. Also, ensure that you adopt measures to make it impossible to transfer the confidential information outside specific departments.
Some of the encrypted sharing techniques that you can adopt include the Dropbox, the IDrive, and Signal App. Whatever technique you apply, make sure that your employees do not share confidential information with unauthorized outsiders.
Regular Training
Your IT team should be exposed to security awareness training regularly to ensure that they make amendments to protect your business from emerging security risks.
Also, you should ensure that you train your employees on the need to maintain confidentiality. Let them understand how to use all the measures that you’ve instituted. To avoid resistance, ensure that they know the benefits that they’ll get from the successful implementation of your security measures.
Conclusion
Malicious individuals target business startups since they’re believed to have weak online security systems. You should not fall prey to these individuals! Read the guide that we’ve provided to establish a secure online presence.
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