In business, there’s no such thing as a one man army, and this is what every great business leader understands thoroughly. Your business is your dream, a livelihood and something that gives you purpose in life. Seeing it destroyed because you didn’t prepare your team, can be the epitome of fantasy hindsight. Therefore, you should be cultivating an environment that treats a security breach as a personal attack on the employees themselves. You as the leader, should become the leader of the wolfpack, and treat any hostile cyber attack with rigorous and aggressive action which your entire staff takes part in. Running a small business, you won’t have the funds to employ a large company to do create a firewall for your specific needs. However, you can create a company culture regarding viruses and malware that steals and corrupts your business’s data.
Authentication walls
Every single one of your employees must set themselves a complex password that they should find it difficult to remember at first. They can write it down and memorise it whilst at home and in their spare time. They must never tell their password to anyone, whether it’s to a manager or another employee. Teach your employees that no valuable data should be kept on their phones, personal laptops, and tablets. Their password for the work computer must be purely one of a kind. Furthermore, emails and file sharing websites should be different passwords, and no pattern of letters or numbers should be remotely identical. When logging onto the company mainframe or work dashboard, past the password and username verification, there should also be personal information questions. These could be the name of their pet, their middle name, favourite football team, etc.
Floating figments
There’s nothing like having a backup of all your data and not worrying about it being vulnerable. Teach your employees that leaving data to rest inside a hard drive can be very risky because once a virus is inside your system, nothing is off limits, giving it full access to the inner workings of your business. A cloud backup for business, allows you to securely store your data in a server data center, away from home and work. It will essentially be floating around in a multilayered online fortress which has gateways, locked doors, a maze of interconnecting servers and password protected files and folders. Instruct employees to work together when sharing data and make sure to shut the cyber door, whenever you access the cloud. Only your business will have access to the data, which can be plucked from the sky whenever you need it, and put back inside the castle when you don’t.
Encrypting before saving
Before storing important data such as of your business or clients, you should encrypt the data first. This makes sure that if anyone hostile breaks through and finds it, the data will be meaningless because it’s unreadable. Inform your staff to use the company encryption software before the data is saved. You could make a routine or procedure as part of the company policy to make it part of the office standards, that every employee, before signing off or moving onto a new project, must first scramble the information via an encryption program.
It’s important to instruct and inform your staff to work together to keep the business safe. After all, in the real world, a business won’t survive if all its clients’ data gets robbed because of either inadequate protocols or inept security procedures. Each staff member should be taught to help another when it comes to accessing data and making sure information is properly stored.
