By Mike Yoon
Year 2020 was a rude awakening for many and 2021 comes with its own set of unique challenges. In years prior, many businesses have openly expressed their resistance about allowing their company employees to work remotely, but the COVID-19 pandemic has forced many of us to swim in unfamiliar territory.
Now, businesses must adapt or risk falling behind their competitors. This could include adjusting to constantly evolving health mandates from federal, state, and local government or transitioning to telecommuting. Understandably, with these changes in action, more issues related to cyber security, data protection and IT support have risen in the last year. And, as more and more businesses experiment with new virtual workplaces, resilient IT security is becoming paramount to their success. Your greatest assets need to be protected with strategic measures in place.
Many business owners need a trustworthy and knowledgeable guide to help find relief and navigate the often new, confusing or stressful IT needs for their business.
For starters, here are 3 KEY STRATEGIES to PROTECT YOUR DATA & YOUR EMPLOYEES, your company’s greatest assets in 2021:
- Your employees are the biggest threat to your company’s data.
As a business owner you must make proactive decisions about how much scope and flexibility you want to offer your employees when they work from home. Establishing clear rules and best practices for your remote work employees will help mitigate the chances of your data and security being compromised.
- Multi factor authentication with sophisticated passwords is a must across all work accounts that employees will be utilizing from home.
- Your employees should be made aware of the latest cyberthreats that are constantly evolving on the internet. This is something that your IT provider should be doing for your company on a regular basis as does Business Computing for all our clients.
- Surfing the internet and streaming content should be done only on personal devices, not work devices or not when connected to your work’s network. (Note: If you are concerned with employees logging into unauthorized sites, investigate a filtering agent that will protect you against accidental or purposeful clicks.)
- Your cloud data needs a secondary backup.
You may have hired a current cloud vendor, but you must be vigilant about having measures in place to protect your company’s data. You cannot solely rely on one single digital storage solution to securely house your data.
- Your vendors may not be forthcoming about the kind of service you are receiving, so even if there are more effective or cost affordable ways around receiving the same service or better service, you will need an IT person to help advocate on your behalf.
- If all your data is only stored on a cloud, you should have a backup to your data available elsewhere, either on a physical server location or with another cloud vendor. Receive a consultation to find out what data centers and secondary vendors are reliable and affordable to meet your company’s needs.
- Increased Hacking Risks When Accessing Social Media on Work Device.
I cannot stress how important it is for your employees to recognize the growing cyber security risks that are present today. With almost everyone connected to some avenue of social media, you should prepare your staff on the suggested protocols to prevent spear phishing and targeted attacks.
- Your employees should not open or log on to social media websites or open any social media content on their work devices unless it has been verified by your IT department.
- Work email addresses should never be used for any type of social media site unless authorized by management.
- Ransomware and phishing scams are becoming more common threats to companies of all sizes because hackers know how much more vulnerable employees are, especially in a remote working environment.
Our team of highly knowledgeable IT experts can be your guide to navigate these new or evolving needs for your company.
Email Mike Yoon at ITsupport@buscomp.com for a FREE VIRTUAL 5 -MINUTE CONSULTATION to assess your needs and ultimately learn how he can secure your company’s data.