The New Year is a time when we make plans to make improvements in our life. These improvements are not limited to ourselves and they can include your business as well. The maintenance of business security systems should be done at the beginning of the year to ensure that operations run smoothly and that you do not need to go through corrective maintenance.
How to Secure Your Business
When it comes to security, you should always try to anticipate the possible failures of security systems that may occur to reduce the chances of that failure from occurring. By anticipating failure you are able to have strategies in place and make improvements. Here are 6 ways you can secure your business:
- Implement a social media policy
Social media policies are important as social media in general plays a huge role in our lives. It can blur the line between our work life and our private lives. Employee individual social media accounts can tie them to your business and the things that they post will reflect on them and the business.
Developing a social media policy will ensure that your business’ reputation will be protected as it stipulates that they shouldn’t write anything negative that they wouldn’t want to be spread across the public media. It will also promote better online behaviour that reflects your business’ values and assists employees in knowing the best kind of material to share online.
- Erase your hard drive
Before you think to throw away old computers or copy machines this new year, ensure that you also erase the hard drive. Failing to do so will lead to security breaches as your competitors and business rivals could gain access to all information that is stored such as client details and can affect the overall revenues of the company. Erasing your data on hard drives is a job that should be done with the assistance of professional hard drive destruction services as this ensures that there is no chance of data recovery.
- Keep systems updated
Technology is an important tool for every business, and managing the system is just as important. To ensure that your computers are able to operate smoothly you need to constantly update software to fix any bugs and security problems. There are businesses with no IT staff, so this task might be a challenge.
You can train your employees to install these updates to ensure that their computers are up to date. You can teach them how to check whether an update is okay to install when it becomes available. You can also choose to use a tool that automatically updates software for your business ensuring that all updates occur at the same time. This ensures that system updates are being installed and employees are not just pressing the ‘install update later’ button.
- Install an alarm system
A modern alarm system is important for any business as it is able to protect your valuable business assets such as your computer systems and the data stored from theft. An alarm system can also deter thieves even before they try to gain access into your business premises. A good alarm system should be installed by a reputable security company. The security company should monitor the system and have a response team if a break in were to occur.
Business alarm systems can also offer protection against theft from the outside, but it can be used for access control to gain more control over who has access to certain areas of the office. This is necessary if there is data that is sensitive and that shouldn’t be seen by all the employees. It also restricts information from being accessed by employees who no longer work for your company.
- Keep devices safe
When personal devices are stolen or lost, they could lead to major data loss for your business. For this reason you should remind all your employees to keep track of their devices as they not only contain their personal information, but sensitive and important information about the company that is stored whenever they use it. If it gets into the wrong hands, it could be used as an access point into your business’ network which could pose major security risks. In the event that one of your employees were to lose their devices or if it gets stolen, then they should report it immediately to prevent a disastrous situation.
- Safeguard all passwords
It is a golden rule to have strong passwords in order to avoid data breaches. The more complex a password is, the better. They should be at least eight characters long, with numbers as well as non-standard characters in it to make it difficult to guess. There are a number of online services that give you the option to make use of multi-factor authentication. This gives you extra security as it is a great deterrent for anyone trying to gain access to your accounts.
You can consider having a password manager that will keep track of all the staff members’ usernames and passwords that they all use on various sites. Password managers are able to increase safety and save time as it will automatically fill in the username and password fields.
Take a look at the 6 Common Crimes to be Aware of Committed Within SA Businesses.
