For most upstart companies, growing and succeeding is your main priority. Nothing else matters, after all, if you cannot get past the proof of concept stage and start to really invest in your future. Yet, without a firm grasp on security measures and the right preventative measures, a hacker could ruin your chances for success and growth before you ever get off your feet.
Never underestimate how dangerous a data breach is to a new company. Your data might be stolen, and you lose all trust you had, or your company might be held ransom. In both situations your future is at risk, which is why every business aiming to grow online needs to follow these steps to stay protected:
Use All the Necessary Security Protocols
Your company’s website needs an SSL certificate among other security protocols to keep your data and more importantly, your customer’s data encrypted. This way their data payments can be secure and even if a breach were to happen on a minimal amount of account information can be stolen.
Only Keep Information You Need To
Encrypting data is a great way to also protect your company’s online reputation. While you may not be able to prevent every single hacking attack from affecting your company, limiting the amount of data you collect can minimize the damage. It is far easier to encourage customers to use a unique password for their account with you and to then tell them that only their emails were stolen than it is to tell them their credit cards, expiry dates, and CVV codes were stolen.
Another step is to actively and safely delete information that you don’t need. If you don’t need it, it is potentially a liability in the future.
Train All Your Employees
Over 80% of hacks will be due to your regular employees, not because your IT staff failed in some way. The best way to reduce the risk of being hacked, then, is to simply train them. Make them aware of ransomware and how it can infect your system, and send them to a security company’s website for more information.
Follow up on this knowledge with practical steps. Your employees should go through their old accounts and delete them. They should make all important accounts have unique passwords, turn on two-factor authentication, and they should encrypt their own data. If they are secure, you will also be secure.
Enforce Extra Security Measures on Customers
As stated before, if your customers use a unique password with you then a hack will be localized. When they type in their password, force them to make it have capitals, numbers, symbols, and be a certain amount of words. Depending on your company type you also might want to send out reminders every so often to change their password in the future.
Use the Cloud, But Use it Wisely
Cloud computing is great for many different kinds of businesses, but when you use it you need to be careful. Limit employee access to only what they need, so if they are breached hackers will only gain access to a limited amount of information instead of everything.
