Starting a small business today might be easy for anyone out there, but this doesn’t mean that running it will be effortless!
There are many challenges that small businesses face in today’s digital landscape, making them struggle and even fail very quickly. That’s why a good percentage of small businesses don’t make it to their first year.
Regardless of all these challenges, the number of startups is increasing every year. Why? The credit goes to digital platforms that don’t require small and medium-sized businesses to build a brick and mortar shop and start their businesses without spending a fortune.
But along with the advantages, the digital platforms come with many challenges, one of which is cybersecurity. Despite using advanced solutions like QuickBooks server hosting solutions, small-scale businesses confront many cyberattacks that increase steadily every year.
All cyberattacks cause certain risks, financial loss, disruption, or damage to an organization’s data, function, or reputation. The impact of cyber attacks on your business can be devastating. They can cause:
- Financial losses from theft of information, financial and bank details or money.
- Financial losses from disruption to trading and doing business – especially if you are dependent on doing business online.
- Costs from cleaning up affected systems and getting them up and running.
- Costs of fines if personal data is lost or compromised.
- Costs of losing business through damage to your reputation and customer base.
- Damage to other companies that you supply or are connected to.
This is why, in this blog post, we have come up with some of the best tips that you can use to improve your cybersecurity measures. This guide shows you how you can keep your business safe and protect against online threats by putting some simple steps in place.
Secure your network
The first thing to keep your small business safe from cyberattacks is safeguarding your network with a firewall and encryption information.
There is a high chance that as a small business owner, you bump into work fatigue at your office, and you decide to go to a local coffee shop or any other public places to restart your work and be more productive. As soon as you enter a public place like a local coffee shop, you tend to use the free wi-fi, making you vulnerable to different security threats.
Remember this: if you connect your PC with a local wi-fi to work for your small business, it will open doors to all the online criminals to breach your data and take control of your system. This is why you need to invest in a portable hotspot and carry it with you so that you can work anywhere without worrying about data breaches. It’s good to have penetration testing service that can help to maintain compliance, eliminate IT cyber security threats, and reveal how hackers breach systems.
Improve password protection
Most cyberattacks happen just because of weak passwords. Cybercriminals can easily guess weak passwords like date of birth, phone number, address, or name of your pet. Therefore, it is necessary to use a combination of upper and lower case letters, special characters, and numbers to make your password strong and secure.
You must also activate two-factor authentication in your software solutions used for the small business. Through two-factor authentication, you will add an extra layer of security to your software solution.
Provide training
It is not only an outside hacker that poses a potential risk to your business, but even an employee can make your data and software solutions vulnerable to various types of attacks. It doesn’t matter how good your anti-virus is or how well you have protected your data; if your employees are not aware of cybersecurity basics, you will always be at risk.
Therefore, you must provide proper training to your employees about different cyberattacks, including phishing scams, and ways to prevent them. Phishing is a common threat against small businesses, and most people fall victim due to a lack of knowledge. Make sure that all your new employees take basic cybersecurity training before they start working.
Move to the cloud
Moving to the cloud is an effective solution to ensure data security and prevent the majority of cyberattacks.
Cloud solutions like QuickBooks desktop with hosting services are designed to create multiple security layers around your sensitive data and boost your data security. Moving to the cloud platform, they make sure that even sophisticated hackers cannot get their hands on your data. Besides, the best part is all the cloud solutions are highly economical, and you can easily opt for them without burning a hole in your pocket.
Using Managed Service Providers (MSP)
Opting for an MSP is another much-sought-after solution to ensure the best cybersecurity at small and medium-sized businesses. For most small business owners, taking personal responsibility for their IT infrastructure security is a hassle since they have plenty on their plates to worry about. Leveraging MSP creates a worry-free environment for business owners since it gives end-to-end protection, starting from threat detection, response to investigation, and resolution. It maximizes the defense with a comprehensive set of security controls, such as application control, DLP, encryption, and behavior analysis, eliminating the need for multiple vendors.
Cybersecurity is all about protecting your computer-based equipment and information from unintended or unauthorized access, change, or destruction. We hope this guide provides you with a good practice foundation for business owners and managers to make your small business fully secure from every type of cyberattack.
