How to Avoid Technical and Security Setbacks with Your Business

When running a business, the last thing you need is to get into a muddle. Whether through a technical mistake or a security blunder that causes the business network to get hacked, it’s costly in both time and money to resolve.

In this article, we provide some sage advice to business owners keen to avoid setbacks.

Protecting the Company Network

In order to protect the company network, it’s important to use virus scanners and malware scanners to prevent infection. This is because once an infection hits one computer on the network, it’s going to spread quickly. At that point, it’s very difficult to stop it.

Using the latest enterprise-level scanning software prevents many infections. It’s also necessary to train staff on appropriate security procedures. This includes being careful about what emails they open, the downloads they access and scanning them before opening to check for virus infections. They should be made aware that just because an email is supposedly from someone they know, it doesn’t mean it is.

Backing Up on a Daily Basis

While the company’s network may be backed up externally, it’s important to take a second backup that runs more regularly. Ideally, every night, if not on a continual basis.

Companies can use backup cloud services to provide automated backup protection from failed hard drives and lost backups. These types of services often have rollback features to access previous versions of a file should it have been corrupted or maliciously deleted by a hacker. This avoids losing files like spreadsheets, Word documents and databases that are vital to the operations of the business.

Don’t Forget Brand Reputation

Company brands are at risk from people and other companies’ intent on bringing it down to their level. The threat is so substantial that there are online brand protection services for businesses to cover their bases.

Why would your business want to protect itself this way? The brand can be mentioned in a negative light. It’s possible for a rival company to set up a website that’s almost identical to your own to confuse your customers and materially impact your sales figures.

Certainly, there’s a real need for online brand protection services to avoid a major setback in brand reputation. Once a brand is damaged, it’s very difficult for the company to recover any loss of confidence from customers in time.

Don’t Ignore the Company’s Website

Once the company’s website is set up, don’t forget all about it until something goes wrong.

Many websites today run on WordPress. This is a useful content management system, but it also has some security risks. When WordPress, themes or plugins don’t get updated with new versions that resolve security flaws, it leaves the site open to attacks from hackers.

Even sites that don’t use WordPress are vulnerable to attack. Companies should ensure that their web hosting is kept updated, backed up and secure. Talk with the web host to see if there’s anything else that can be done to make the site safer from intrusion.

Avoiding costly mistakes around security or technical issues is critically important today. Too many companies, especially small ones, make seemingly minor errors and suffer significantly from them.