In the world where viruses and hackers peak from every corner of the web, you must improve and upgrade your protection. Yes, this goes way beyond installing an antivirus software. Staying safe online today means something totally different from what it meant 10 or 20 years ago. I present to you tips on how to keep your small business safe and keep it in your own hands instead of someone taking it all away. I hope no reader of these lines ever experiences the trouble of whole system lockouts, all files encrypted errors or a complete computer system shut down- or worse- identity theft, system files corruption and stolen local data.
If you are running a small business, you should consider these points to keep your computer network safe. Everyone should adopt these best practices and hopefully stay safe. The bad news is that there is no system that can’t be broken into, let’s just hope we take more precautions and stay ahead of all the people with bad intentions.
Protect Your Internet Traffic
First, take a good look at your router. Log into it and enable the security features it might have. Among them, check if there is a firewall option and configure it.
Second, get a reliable VPN. What it does is it hides the IP address you are using. The fake IP is presented to the world (with a fake location), so that it seems like you are someone else from some other country or continent. The second feature is that it encrypts your communication with a remote server. This is so all the traffic in between you and your destination server uses encrypted connection and can’t be spied on. The third is this gets you to the content you need without anybody knowing who you are or what are you doing.
Use Strong Passwords
When it comes to passwords, the best practices are to not even use the words at all, but to just use random characters that don’t mean anything. The second trick to this is to use the characters that are not found on any keyboard, these can only be found by getting to the special menu deep inside the operating system. This makes the password really hard to guess. You can find many password generators online and combining them into one strong password is a great idea.
This does make using the password a bit more difficult, but it does improve online security for your business.
Educate your employees
Make sure that your employees know what they are allowed to do on a company computer and what is not allowed. Educate them to only use trusted sources and never accept email attachments from any unknown person, even if the message is from someone known. Always make sure that it was not sent without or very little context. Email spoofing is still not so hard to do, so always make sure to act if you spot anything unexpected.
Remember: Just one employee is enough to destroy the whole network of computers and cause great damage to your business. Keep everyone educated and informed about the best practices.
Pick an Internet Security Software
Back in the day, it was enough to have an antivirus software installed to be safe. Today, these are sophisticated internet security solutions that combine more aspects of security to keep your computer safe. While more protection layers are always a good thing, it can slow down your work computers so be sure to include the performance chart while deciding on a vendor. Another tip: be sure to pick a company that has experience protecting computers in both small business and enterprise environments.