How To Ensure You Have Good Cybersecurity In Your Business

As a business owner, one of the most important elements to have in place – among many important elements – is your cybersecurity measures. Cybersecurity is all about ensuring no one can get into your computing networks and systems unless they have permission to be there, meaning that your company’s (and your customers’) sensitive information is kept safe and secure. 

Without good cybersecurity in place, you’re putting your business at risk of becoming vulnerable to hackers who want to disrupt what you’re doing and steal financial and personal data – they’ll use it to steal money, hold the business to ransom, or commit identity theft. No matter what their reasons, it’s clearly not a good thing for the business to go through, and you’ll lose customers who feel you have let them down. With that in mind, here are some of the things you can do to ensure you have good cybersecurity in your business. Keep reading to find out more.

Do A Security Audit 

The first thing to do when you want to know if your cybersecurity is up to scratch is to conduct a security audit. In that way, you’ll quickly be able to see which areas of your business (if any) are vulnerable to a cybersecurity attack and which ones are safe. When you have that information, you can make changes and improve your security measures so that everything is as strong as everything else. 

The things you’ll need to look at include your software and how up-to-date it is. If you haven’t run an update for a while because it takes time (perhaps the request pops up, but you click it away, thinking you’ll deal with it another time) and you want to keep on working – that’s something that many people say is the reason they don’t update their systems very often. However, using outdated systems means there’s a much higher chance that a cybercriminal will be able to get through and defences you might have – they’ll have had longer and gained more information to work it out. The newer your software, the less knowledge they’ll have, and it will take them longer to get through the barriers. 

Get Expert Help

Something else that’s sure to help and give you a huge insight into your cybersecurity issues (or, hopefully, your lack of them) is an expert. It’s possible to hire people with inside information about exactly how cybercriminals do their work and how they can get into various computer networks and systems, and if you can call on their expertise to help you with your audit, you won’t miss a thing. 

Reach out to a company such as Hire A Hacker, and you’ll be given a full and in-depth view of everything you’re doing and whether or not it’s enough to prevent cybercriminals from getting into your systems and stealing the sensitive information we mentioned above. Armed with this information and with the advice they’ll give as a result of finding out your business’s security weaknesses, you’ll be able to fix the problems and strengthen your cybersecurity so that it keeps everyone out who should be there. 

Educate Your Team on Cybersecurity

It’s all very well having good cybersecurity measures in place, but what about your team? If they don’t understand what you’re doing and why, they might not follow the rules – or even understand them – and they might accidentally open up a vulnerability that a cybercriminal could exploit. 

Take passwords, for example. There are many situations in which a password is crucial (including when you’re using cloud computing, for example), but a lot of the time, people – including your employees – are going to pick an easy-to-remember password so that they can, well, remember it. However, an easy-to-remember password is also easy to hack, and that’s why you need to train your team on how to choose stronger passwords and perhaps even guide them to using a password manager. In that way, your system instantly becomes harder to hack. 

You’ll also need to carry out training on cybersecurity in general, teaching your team why hackers need to be kept away and what damage they can do. On top of this, making sure they understand about phishing emails, suspicious links, and dangerous attachments can all go towards helping them help you keep your security measures strong. 

Back Up Your Data

Even if you’re doing everything you can to ensure that your cybersecurity measures are strong and up to date, there’s always a very small chance that a hacker could gain access – even the very smallest vulnerability could be enough. That’s why it’s so important to back up your data; if something did go wrong, it would be bad, but with data you can retrieve from an external hard drive or the cloud, for example, you can set your business up and running again with very limited disruption. 

Without a good backup in place, a cyberattack could mean you lose everything, which would be a disaster, leading to the loss of your business in a lot of cases. The simple act of regularly backing up your data means that even in the worst cases, it won’t be as bad as it could be. Yes, you’ll have to tell your customers what happened and yes, you might lose some because of the mistakes that were made, but at least your business can continue. 

Monitor Your Network Traffic

There are tools you can put in place that will actively monitor your network traffic in real-time to see if there are any strange occurrences that might show you have a hacker in your midst. If you spot any unusual activity or anomalies in the data you receive, you’ll be able to launch a counter-attack and remove the hacker more quickly, ensuring they’re kicked out of the system before they can do any (or at least too much) damage. 

Not only can you remove the cybercriminal earlier in the process, but this information will show you were there are still vulnerabilities in your network, enabling you to fix them – you’ll be able to plug up the gaps, in other words.