5 Cybersecurity Best Practices for Your Company

In 2018, studies found that close to 60% of all cyberattacks are aimed at small and medium sized businesses. As criminals get smarter and more sophisticated, it’s never been so essential to protect businesses from cyber threats. If you own a business or are a CIO, here are five cybersecurity best practices for your company:

Train Your Employees

When it comes to corporate cybersecurity, having the best network firewall available in the market won’t help you if your employees are not making a conscious effort to protect your company’s data. Invest some time to train your internal teams and get everyone on the same page about the importance of cybersecurity. You might want to discuss online behaviours, too. For example, an innocent selfie taken at work can reveal sensitive information written on a whiteboard.

Create a Cybersecurity Policy

Your company should consider creating an employee handbook with policies, procedures, and processes to guide your staff on what they should and shouldn’t do. It’s also recommended to create a cybersecurity policy to establish file accessibility, enforce security protocols, and communicate best practices to keep data protected. Are employees allowed to take their laptops home? How often should they change their passwords? What people should do if they suspect a data breach? You need to provide a clear answer to these questions.

Protect Your Passwords

Prevent your staff from using weak passwords like “123456”, “qwerty”, and “donald”. While this may sound obvious, you might be surprised by how many employees choose bad passwords that can expose your business. Require them to change passwords often and keep them secure. Another good idea to strengthen your cybersecurity is to enforce two-factor authentication.

Backup to the Cloud

In this day and age, it’s almost impossible to run a company without any software, and the best software solutions in the market rely on data. It’s essential to create backups periodically, but even frequent backups won’t protect your data if you don’t store them properly. Cloud backups are a great solution because they’re secure, accessible, and fast.

Upgrade your IT Infrastructure

Having an optimized IT infrastructure is critical for the success of your company. Aside from streamlining your operations and improving your productivity, it also strengthens your lines of defense against cyber threats. From hardware to software, work with your IT department to ensure everything is up-to-date and running smoothly.

We hope these cybersecurity tips help your organization protect sensitive information, avoid data breaches, and become more efficient. If you’re trying to implement these best practices, contact us.