You should always take cyber defense seriously, regardless of your company’s size. Although data breaches are common in government agencies and corporations, the truth is even a small business can be a victim of cyber threats too. Remember that cyber criminals don’t discriminate and will attack whenever or whoever they want.
As a business owner, you should know why is cybersecurity important for your venture. Once you understand its significance, you’ll realize how it can benefit your business over time. This is especially true if you deal with online transactions daily. Fortunately, there are many ways to improve your company’s cyber defense, and these include the following:
Limit Data Access
Monitoring every employee’s online interactions can be invading and time-consuming. To prevent any trouble when checking online interactions, create policies that guide your employees to protect sensitive data. It may include limiting access to particular information and requiring them to add more passwords, security questions, and encryption.
You should also be clear about the consequences that employees may face when they disregard your company’s policies. Investing in a security operations center or SOC as a service and layered security may keep your confidential data safe as well should a data breach occur.
Create a Recovery Plan
Business continuity when a breach happens isn’t possible without a recovery plan. Creating one for your business makes it easy to bounce back with confidence. Plus, you can minimize the impact and cost of cyber threats.
Some of the steps to develop a recovery plan include:
- Determine The Plan Owner – A cybersecurity recovery plan must be owned by those who’ll lead the recovery process. And it should be someone who’s readily accessible and can be contacted when needed.
- Distinguish Critical Assets – Business continuity revolves around ensuring essential assets are available and online to start and maintain operations.
- Know The Risks – Several critical assets face various risks ranging from power outages to ransomware attacks. Documenting and identifying such risks allow you to create plans to minimize and address them.
- Create Strategies – Your recovery plan must include strategies to back up critical assets, respond to incidents, communicate with key stakeholders, and protect them against risks. By understanding what could go wrong and what needs protecting, your team can create strategies to manage the risks.
Once you’re done creating your cybersecurity recovery plan, you should run regular tests to know if there are errors or gaps. This way, you can easily make necessary changes to ensure that your recovery plan will work effectively without compromising your online security.
Provide Employee Awareness Training
Another way to boost your company’s cyber defense is to provide cybersecurity awareness training to your employees.
Cybersecurity education and professional development can empower every employee to understand cybersecurity and recognize the importance of all individuals working proactively to reduce vulnerabilities and threats. This way, your company can position itself for robust security and may impact how well it’s protected from all types of cyber threats.
Use Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
MFA offers an additional security layer to cyber-attacks and must be implemented in your company. One of the benefits of MFA is that even though a password and username have been correctly guessed or stolen, it’d be challenging for cyber criminals to access the data.
If MFA is appropriately configured, users will get alerts or notifications for any attempts to log in to their accounts. If they’re alerted to attempts to access the account, and it wasn’t them, they’re more likely to report the case to your company’s security team. With this, your security team can take action immediately before a possible breach happens.
MFA offers an additional security layer to cyber-attacks and must be implemented in your company. One of the benefits of MFA is that even though a password and username have been correctly guessed or stolen, it’d be challenging for cyber criminals to access the data.
If MFA is appropriately configured, users will get alerts or notifications for any attempts to log in to their accounts. If they’re alerted to attempts to access the account, and it wasn’t them, they’re more likely to report the case to your company’s security team. With this, your security team can take action immediately before a possible breach happens.
Keep Your Operating Systems And Apps Updated
Software developers regularly release updates designed to boost security against cyber threats. Rather than viewing such updates as a burden, try viewing them as a welcome security update. Once updates are available, make sure to install them quickly to ensure your operating systems and apps have the latest security patches against threats.
Vary Your Passwords
Even if it’s much easier to remember one password for all your accounts, it isn’t the most secure and effective practice to enhance your company’s cyber defense. An excellent practice you should consider is to vary your passwords for each account you use. This way, when hackers attack your company, the stolen credentials won’t work on some sites or accounts.
If you often find it challenging to remember your passwords, you can use a password manager. It’s a program or software that keeps your passwords in one place. To access your passwords, you’ll be provided with a master key. With this, you don’t need to worry about remembering your passwords, and it keeps you from writing them down, which is also a bad idea.
At present, you can find several password managers online. Depending on your preferences and budget, choose the one that fits your needs. Comparing the available options may help you decide which password manager is ideal for you too.
Use Anti-Malware And Antivirus Software
Investing in anti-malware and antivirus software protects your business against viruses and common attacks and threats. In addition, they’re equipped with monitoring and analytic tools that help identify suspicious activities in your network, which may come in handy to protect your infrastructure.
You can consider many options when it comes to anti-malware or antivirus software. The best one varies depending on your needs. To make your selection process easy, use the following criteria when comparing your preferred options:
- Reliability – Even the most comprehensive antivirus software can be useless if it doesn’t work well with the other systems that run on your computer. If such conflicts result in disabling antivirus protection capability, it may leave your business vulnerable.
- Comprehensive Protection – The best antivirus and anti-malware software must deliver constant protection for every computer domain and all types of network elements and files subject to malware or computer virus attacks. The software must detect malicious code and protect every channel or entry point to the computer as well, including the internet and email.
Aside from the above, the software must also be easy to use and should provide quality protection for better results. If you’re confused with the choices, let your security team decide the right option.
Conclusion
There isn’t a single solution that’ll defend your company from cyber threats. Nonetheless, with consistent efforts and the right cybersecurity practices, it’s possible to improve your company’s cyber defense. If you don’t know how to kickstart your cybersecurity efforts, the above mentioned strategies can make a difference in building an effective security posture for your business.
