I received this question via email yesterday.
“How do small to medium size businesses protect themselves from hackers in today’s connected digital world?”
Here are some basic steps all businesses should take that do not take a lot of money to begin.
1) Educate your employees – most attacks on small business come via bad emails. Get your IT professional to explain how attacks occur and how all employees can play a part in preventing attacks
2) Analyze the infrastructure – do you have up to date Windows patches, etc. We had one client still using Internet Explorer on Windows 7 as their software developer had not upgraded the program for Windows 10 and Edge.
3) Check your anti virus software to make sure it is up to date for all computers and server
4) get a multi night data cloud back up plan. We do 5 day backup for our clients as hackers can infect cloud backups – you may lose an extra day of data but you can survive an attack
5) create a plan. Discuss disaster recovery with your IT professional. – yes a hack can be a disaster
This is a start and it does not cost a large investment to start protecting your business
Contact us if you want to discuss