How are you protecting your company? Most data breaches in the headlines involve big companies—Yahoo, Facebook, Equifax. However, while smaller companies are off the news radar, this does not mean that they are immune from malicious attacks. In fact, the risk is even higher as many small businesses may not have proper security measures and protocols in place to combat hackers.  

The big question is, can your business survive a cyberattack? Can you survive to have your website and email service going down for a week or more while hurrying to resolve the problem?  Can you survive the loss of valuable business partners or the reputational damage of data compromise?

Unless you take all your business operations offline, there is no 100 percent guarantee that your business will be hack-free. Here are five simple tips that will protect your company against malicious attackers:

Don’t skimp on your security budget

Cybersecurity is insurance worth the investment. You need security solutions such as anti-virus, anti-spam, firewall, VPN, encryption, data backups, and more. Not having security is much more expensive than having it. The legal penalties, business losses, and reputational damage following a data breach are enough to make a small business go bankrupt. Investing in security and addressing your vulnerabilities early on will spare you from massive financial losses in the future. 

Unfortunately, security is not always a top priority for many organizations.  A survey revealed that small businesses spend an average less than $500 on cybersecurity. Meanwhile, 50 percent of IT professionals said they are facing a bottleneck in cybersecurity due to budget constraints. Just remember—you get what you pay for. Don’t expect to keep attackers at bay with a free anti-virus or malware detection program. 

Protect your company by educating your employees

Software solutions alone are not enough to protect your business against cyberattacks. Many attackers capitalize on human relationships to infiltrate networks and systems. This includes methods such as social engineering or spear-phishing aimed at specific employees. A hacker can pretend to be a real customer or borrow the identity of high-ranking company admins or business partners to have employees reveal their login credentials or make a fund transfer.  

These threats can be combatted with proper education. Make sure that your employees aren’t opening the door to the bad guys and letting them walk unabashed to your systems. Train your staff how to recognize an attack in progress and set-up an incident-response strategy to effectively deal with cybersecurity incidents like a data breach or cyber attack.

Employ a secure login management system

Passwords are high-value targets for attackers and the reason behind many successful security breaches. Many businesses implement strict password security protocols or employ password management solutions to protect logins. However, even with proper management, passwords are still vulnerable to compromise. The answer is to utilize secure login management solutions such as TraitWare. 

TraitWare is an enterprise-class single sign-on (SSO) and multi-factor authentication (MFA) solution. It is passwordless, thus, removing all password-related risks in the equation. MFA uses not one but two or more authentication factors to secure your accounts. Even if one factor is compromised, there are other factors to stop or slow down hackers. On the other hand, SSO unifies all your enterprise applications for quick, easy, and frictionless logins.  

Segregate and manage access to sensitive data

Using the cloud to store business data is now the norm, and it gives businesses many benefits. However, we should also understand the disadvantages of putting your valuable data in the cloud. Protecting and managing data in the cloud can be quite a hassle. Many businesses don’t even know where their data is. A survey revealed that 48 percent of IT professionals do not know which countries their data resided in once it is uploaded.

Data segregation is also a big problem among organizations. This leaves millions of documents sitting in enterprise application servers that might be accessible to all users and makes data access management all the more complicated. Most employees do not need full access to all your business data. Reducing the number of people who have access to your sensitive data will reduce the negative consequences of unauthorized access.

Don’t forget the basics to protect your company

You don’t need to be an IT geek to keep out attackers. When talking about security, sometimes we forget the simplest guidelines to prevent hackers from intruding in our computer networks, such as:

  • Limit access and block unnecessary sites.
  • Do not download files and programs from unauthorized websites.
  • Do not click on random email attachments.
  • Scan all types of hard drives before running.
  • Never share your login information to anyone.