How to keep your small business network secure

How to keep your small business network secure

The global costs of cybercrime, already in the trillions of dollars, continue to rise. Businesses are facing a constant onslaught of threats coming from all angles. To make matters worse, the threat landscape changes every day as new vulnerabilities arise and new scams proliferate on the dark web. At the same, attack surfaces continue to expand as more internet-connected devices enter our homes and workplaces.

As cyberthreats continue to evolve, business technology must evolve as well, preferably at a speed where it’s always one step ahead of criminals. As such, proactive care has become the favored option, in which data breaches are discovered and dealt with in real time, rather than hiding beneath the surface for months.

Here’s an overview of how business leaders can adopt a proactive care strategy that helps secure their future success:

Establishing your digital perimeter

A robust information security infrastructure used to be much easier to accomplish. Businesses only had to worry about securing their internal networks behind an enterprise-grade firewall and protecting their desktops with antivirus software. Before the rise of cloud services and mobile technologies, companies typically kept their data within their own walls, therefore making the attack surface relatively small.

Traditional perimeter security is no longer enough. Digital information management no longer stops at the boundaries of the office. More than ever, employees are becoming accustomed to using their own devices for work and, if these devices store or access any confidential data, then they must also be included as part of a wider cybersecurity strategy. The same applies to online storage services, which present both risks and opportunities.

Protecting mobile users

Mobile devices get mislaid or stolen all the time, but having an unauthorized party get their hands on any confidential data stored on it is worse than losing the device itself. No modern business can afford to eschew mobile technology in a time when workforce mobility and flexibility are the new norms. Instead, businesses must establish a strong mobile policy that aligns with their wider cybersecurity strategy.

The easiest way to protect mobile users is to prevent them from storing any sensitive data on their devices in the first place. Instead, these devices should only be used as access points, while the data itself is stored on an encrypted and centrally managed system that’s under the complete control of the business. Furthermore, administrators should always have full visibility into who’s accessing their data using a centralized management dashboard that allows them to revoke access rights at will.

Training your employees

A robust cybersecurity strategy consists of administrative, physical, and technological controls, including everything from locked server rooms to antivirus software. However, the weakest link is always the human one. No amount of technology or security policy documentation can change that. Instead, these factors are merely aides in the process but, in the end, security starts and finishes with your employees.

Given that the clear majority of successful data breaches occur due to human error, security awareness training is the single most important part of your strategy. Most criminals work by exploiting human ignorance than vulnerabilities in technology itself, so your staff needs to be well-equipped to identify social engineering scams and other threats.

Ongoing training is also important since the threats change and evolve all the time. Things like simulated phishing attacks and awareness training will help you transform your employees from the weakest links in information security into human firewalls.

Binatech puts your information security worries to rest with proactive support. Call us today to schedule your first network assessment for free.