Cybersecurity.
It’s one of the most important pieces of your digital business infrastructure, and yet, we find that it’s also one of the most neglected. Now more than ever, it’s critical that you routinely check in and audit your various cybersecurity measures to ensure that they are functioning properly. Protecting your business from cyber-attacks should be one of your top priorities as a harmful cyber-attack or data breach can potentially sink your entire company!
In today’s blog, let’s quickly go over why you should be auditing your cybersecurity practices on a regular basis and the potentially scary consequences of security neglect.
Protect Your Company’s Daily Operations and Productivity
One of the first reasons why you should be auditing your security practices is to simply keep your daily operations online and productive! A lack of digital security can seriously slow down your employee productivity due to various sneaky malware attacks that will surely sneak into your hardware network unless prevented.
It’s also worth noting that no employee wants to work for a company with outdated or unprotected technology, making their day-to-day tasks a complete slog. Audit your security regularly to keep your long-term company productivity and morale high.
Security Breaches Aren’t Always Apparent
It can take weeks, even months, just to even detect a security breach, especially if your company consists of many different moving parts and departments. While you’re unaware, these breaches may be stealing confidential and sensitive information or wreaking havoc on your business infrastructure.
Regularly auditing your company’s cybersecurity protocols is one of the best ways to catch security breaches, viruses, or bugs before they even have a chance to do permanent damage. Audits present you the opportunity to perform early intervention security practices, ensuring that your critical documents, hardware, and other operations remain fully functional and protected.
Discover Areas of Improvement
Aren’t we all seeking to be a better functioning business every day? By auditing your cybersecurity, you’ll be combing through your various accounts, services, authentication practices, and overall business systems. Doing this provides a first-hand look at not only your security features but your overall digital and hardware infrastructure.
This provides you with the opportunity both to improve your digital security practices and to see other areas of your business that may need improvements, updates, or replacements. Remember, digital infrastructure functions as a series of moving parts, and cybersecurity, while essential, is just one of those moving parts.
Save Time, Energy, and Money
While it may seem a tedious task, routine security audits actually help save you and your business time, energy, money, and reduce overall company stress. Reversing the damage done by security breaches, viruses, and other forms of malware is expensive (potentially business-ending) and time-consuming for everyone involved. Unless you want your employees to be “all hands on deck” figuring out how to stop a nasty virus or security breach, let’s prevent it altogether.
Security audits also provide overall peace of mind, which is of course, priceless. Without having to worry about the constant threat of cyberattacks, you and your business are sure to focus on what matters most, your daily tasks, milestones, and ultimately, profits.
Don’t Ruin Your Company’s Reputation
While we have spoken about company reputation and security breaches in the past, we cannot overstate the critical importance of routine security audits to protect your business reputation. Security breaches are nasty and wide-ranging, not only affecting your business, but also your clients, customers, staff, and any other stakeholders who have trusted you with sensitive or confidential information.
Security breaches can potentially lead to broken trust and client relationships, destroying company morale and reputation, possibly taking years to regain. And, in the age of social media, nothing is a secret. Your business’s data breach woes will surely be public knowledge, cautioning all future employee and client prospects. Let’s just try to avoid this scenario altogether.
Basic Security Audits That You Can Perform Today
Employee And Client Access
When assessing your security measures, you’ll want to make sure that you know exactly who has access to which accounts, files, and other critical information and services. This is especially true now as much of the nation works from home.
While we aren’t trying to point fingers in the event of an accidental security breach, it’s important to know where or who the breach came from before figuring out the best solutions to fix the breach. This also allows your employees to fully understand the security measures and practices that they need to follow to protect your business.
Make Sure That Your Software Is Updated!
This is one of the easiest ways to ensure that your systems are protected against cybersecurity, and yet it’s one of the most ignored routine tasks. You should be updating your software whenever you receive a notification from the brand or software creator.
These software updates often implement significant security updates automatically, as developers and cybercriminals are constantly striving to get ahead of each other. Fall behind in your updates and you’ll leave yourself open to attacks.
Brainstorm & Discover Potential Threats
Do you have potentially negligent employees? Or, have you recently severed a toxic business relationship? These may all be security threats and you’ll want to make sure that you take the necessary steps to restrict access from these employees to your sensitive information. Often, simple security education is required to tighten up individual security negligence.
Check & Change Your Passwords!
We can’t say it enough; you have to check and change your passwords on a regular basis. This isn’t just a tip, it’s business best practice and necessity. Having weak or easy-to-guess passwords is one of the top ways that cybercriminals gain access to your systems. By using techniques such as two-factor authentication, complex passwords, and routine password changing, you’ll be able to stay ahead of criminals and in control of your business.
Outsource Your Security Audit To IT Professionals
While we have outlined some basic and easy-to-take-on steps to performing security checks and audits, you may want to consider outsourcing this task to properly trained IT professionals. Your security shouldn’t be taken lightly, and at M&H Consulting, we ensure that your systems remain safe and secure, keeping your business running smoothly, productively, and safely.
Categorised in: antivirus, Security, spam, spyware, Uncategorized, virus