Cybersecurity Tips: Make Sure You're Doing These 3 Things

What's more expensive, investing in a hosted server and IT management system or a data breach? The data breach, by far.

The average data breach costs businesses 3 million dollars per breach. Secure technology for your business won’t be nearly that.

Cyber attacks are happening to businesses everywhere of all sizes. Small businesses, in particular, are a vulnerable target because they are generally under-protected.

To keep your data safe from a cyber breach, we encourage you to put the proper resources toward data security. It doesn’t have to be a daunting or expensive task. Start with these quick tips.

3 Quick Cybersecurity Tips to Keep Your Small Business Safe

Give Everyone Different Passwords

When you're a small company, it's easy to just set one password to a particular app or profile and have everyone access it. But that's not safe, nor is it smart. Your passwords should be different for each user, and the fewer users that access one profile/account, the safer it is.

Ask yourself how many people really need access to your company’s Facebook account or your company's bank account. Two, maybe three tops. Pay the extra money to have additional users on a platform if that's an option.

Also, if you have everyone change their passwords and there is a breach, it will be easier to identify which account the breach happened on. You can then investigate that person or learn more about the circumstances from there.

Have Separate Wi-Fis

If you have Wi-Fi for your guests or clients, it shouldn't be the Wi-Fi that your business functions on. Giving out that mass password information isn't safe, and it can slow down your server.

You should have a remote server to host your business and employ residential Wi-Fi for your in-office guests/clients. That way your information is totally separate, and if the router in your office goes down or slows from overuse, your business won't be impacted.

Train Employees

The best thing you can do for your business, on the lower cost end, is to teach your employees useful cyber safety tips. Even if it's as simple as teaching them the difference between http and https. If they know the difference between a secure site and a non-secure site, that's a good start.

Or you could install software on their computers to do it for them. Certain security software will give sites ratings based on their perceived safety.

You should also teach your employees how to create strong passwords. They should have capital letters, numbers, and at least one symbol. Have them choose words that aren't easy to guess, as hackers essentially access passwords as a word scramble.

It's a lot easier to guess cat from a-c-t than it is to guess bigBlueDr@gonfly!5.

Don’t Mess Around With Computer Security

Tech support and computer security is nothing to mess around with. If you under-invest in or underestimate their importance, you're putting your company on the line.

For more information on how to keep your company safe, check out this webinar where we share some useful tips and best practices.

You might also like to check out this blog post, where we discuss copiers and data security. Do you know what your copy machine is actually storing?

As data breaches are becoming more severe, it’s essential for businesses to focus on keeping their data safe. At MGA, we help many clients by sharing tips on how to address the increased risk of data management, how to build data privacy and security into their company culture, and how to engage their employees to be part of the process.

We can help you with this overwhelming topic, too.

Let's talk!