How to protect your small business from hackers

Passwords

Small business owners have a lot on their plate and so it can be hard to find time to think about things like cybersecurity.

However, cybersecurity is important for any size of business and if this is not something that is carefully considered, a small business could face serious consequences if a hacker were to slip through the net.

In this guide, we are going to offer some tips that should help you to protect your small business from hackers.

Train Your Employees

One of the first things that you should do when you are hoping to protect your small business from hackers is to make sure that your employees are properly trained. If they don’t know what they are supposed to be doing when it comes to protecting customer data, how can you expect them to do it? Employee training can be done in-house but if you don’t have much experience in cybersecurity, you might want to look into having an expert come into your business in order to give your team proper training.

Consider An SDP

You may have heard other business owners suggest that you can protect your small business using a VPN, but you should also consider an SDP. SDP stands for a Software Defined Perimeter if this isn’t something that you are familiar with.  A software defined perimeter solution has many advantages compared to a simple VPN including adaptability to every network and policies based on users. Invest in an SDP today and you’ll thank yourself in the long-run.

Rethink Your Passwords

Many business owners and employees make the mistake of thinking that their passwords are secure when they definitely are not. Passwords can’t be the name of your first pet or your partner and if they are, you’ll find that hackers can easily target your business. There are some great ways that you can improve password security including changing the criteria and asking employees to change passwords every month. You can also introduce two-factor authentication as this can be very effective in deterring hackers.

Don’t Ignore Updates

Finally, you should ensure that you are performing regular updates on your system and software if you want to make sure that you are protected from hackers. It is common for updates to offer patches for security and if you miss out on these, you risk having unwanted visitors in your system. It might be worth setting your updates to come through automatically so that you have one less thing to worry about.

Protect Your Business

If you have set up your own business, you will want to protect it as much as you can. Try to take on board all of the advice that we have given you in this article and you should find that you are much more proactive. It isn’t easy to deter hackers completely from your system but if you have measures in place, you can reduce the risks.