Top 5 Security Practices For Small Businesses

Small businesses often do not have the luxury of a huge marketing budget to promote their businesses or services through several medium. Generally, they do not have multi location presence and to leverage the power of internet they come up with their own website. More often, they have to rely on the new age marketing practices, such as social media, website advertising or Google advertising. There has been a constant rise in the online hacks and other ransomware attacks targeting small websites that lack basic website security.

Here is a list of security practices that you should not neglect.

1. Educate & Train Your Users

Train your users on how to identify spam emails and other unsolicited emails that may ask you for certain details. Also teach them to be cautious of any message that contains a hyperlink even though it looks legitimate. These could be the phishing emails that look legitimate but are intended to get information from you in order to harm your business.

2. Adhere to Google Security Guidelines

If most of your business is dependent on your website, then you can not afford to ignore Google. Recently, they have announced a major update keeping in mind the safe internet motto. In summary, it says that every website should have an SSL certificate installed. The reason Google runs on this motto is to make the internet a clean and safe place for all of us. SSL certificates do this job very well by authenticating a website owner’s identity in order to prevent the rise of fake websites. You should check different types of ssl certificate according your business requirements.

3. Backup Your Data

Yes, it sounds very normal but think through this, you have a routine to backup your data once in a month but you are not aware of the fact that your website can get attacked at any point in time. In this case, you may lose all your data if it hasn’t been backed up on daily basis. Sometimes there are internal employees who can cause some damage to your data, which is very obvious in 50% of data breaches. Read this here

4. Keep Your Software Updated

Software companies generally update their software libraries with fixes for the latest upcoming threats. Hacker/intruders are always on lookout to find low optimized networks or websites. If your software is not updated with the latest updates then it can be vulnerable to such attacks.

5. Limit Your Social Media Exposure

Yes, social media has more power for businesses, but you should be very careful in terms of engaging with a stranger on social media. The information that you share on social media should be public information that would not have any negative impact on your business.

Having said this, there are many checklists of steps you should follow in order to protect your business from hackers. But if you follow this strictly, you are much safer than someone who is not concerned about security. Do share your comments for what different types of security you are following.