What small businesses can do to level-up their cyber security

In a rapidly shifting digital landscape, cyber security can often feel like an overwhelmingly complex issue for small businesses to deal with. While the issues emerging are undoubtedly complex, and the relevant regulatory frameworks more and more stringent, there’s a lot that businesses can do to level up their approach.

Widespread employee training

With all security-related issues, human error is something that has to be accounted for. You can have the most advantaged software and hardware solutions, but if an employee uses a weak password, those investments count for next to nothing.

Cyber security is something that has to be integrated into company culture through the use of widespread, regular employee training. The exact nature of this training may vary slightly depending on your business, but it should generally cover issues such as creating strong passwords, identifying suspicious behaviour, and the importance of conducting regular software updates.

Work with professionals

In most cases, you wouldn’t try to fit your own locks to your business’s front door, so why should you treat cyber security any differently? It’s important to work with cyber security experts from a provider such as Mitigate Cyber, who can help you to identify potential risks that your business is likely to face, and then implement some appropriate security measures to mitigate those risks.

Keep up to date with regulatory changes

Cybersecurity is still a relatively young field, and as a result, the legal hurdles you have to clear are constantly changing. From GDPR to industry-specific regulations, it’s important that you constantly keep up to date with any relative legal changes, to ensure that you remain compliant. Failure to comply can result in serious legal repercussions, especially in the event that the lack of compliance leads to a serious data breach.

Multi-factor authentication

One of the best ways of ensuring that no unauthorised access occurs in your business is by enforcing a multi-factor authentication policy. This way, even if a cybercriminal cracks the password of an account, they still have to clear the other requirements to gain access, whether a code that’s texted to the genuine user or a third-party app that provides constantly changing codes.

Data backups

Part of ensuring a thorough approach to data security consists of regularly backing up data. While in many cases, it’ll be a cyber criminal who attempts to force entry and tamper with data, this can also happen through human error or by accident. It’s important to have measures in place that mean data can’t be wiped out if it’s lost from a single source. It should be backed up in at least three locations, preferably through a combination of physical and cloud-based data storage solutions.

While this probably feels like a lot to take in, cyber security needn’t be overwhelming. By laying out a strategic approach, small businesses can ensure that they’re covering all the necessary areas with minimal effort. It’s not an issue that any business can afford to overlook, both in terms of legal implications for regulatory breaches, and in terms of the loss of public trust in the event of a cyber security disaster.

*This is a collaborative post.