Protection

We all know how much new stuff we need to acquire when we are in the process of starting our own business, even if it is only a one person, home based business. We think we won’t need anything security-wise, since we are just small and unimportant, but that is not the case anymore.

First thing, that all of us need to consider is online security. Since most of us is using computers for either advertising, selling, purchasing, communications etc.  it is a first thing that needs to be taken under consideration. We all hear of security breaches in large organizations from time to time, but the smaller ones don’t advertise them, and we don’t know about them unless we are one of their clients and receive a security breach notification, but they do happen often. Not many of us realize that we are responsible for all of our clients /suppliers etc. data but also can be sued if a virus we send to one of our contacts, causes a shut down of operation in their whole organization. These costs can easily turn into millions of dollars… I would strongly recommend talking to a commercial insurance representative and learning more about cyber insurance. Even with cyber insurance, we should take precautions to protect our business from cyber-attacks, phishing, malware and viruses.  Remember cyber insurance is there to protect us if something gets through our defenses.

First thing we need to install a good antivirus with web security option included, and a second is a password manager, to organize our passwords and make sure they are not easily guessed. This will not only prevent others from affecting us with viruses, malware and ransomware but also will protect our own personal banking and financial information from easy access by cyber criminals. For more information on how it works and what is involved, contact us. We can help you find a solution that works.

Second thing to consider is a good router that will allow to separate our personal home network from a business one. There are inexpensive solutions out there and they are worth every penny. Just remember not to share your business network wi-fi password with anybody 😉

Third, very important part of security is backup. Depending on our needs we can find a lot of different, quite often inexpensive backup solutions, and no, working on cloud drives (One Drive, Google Drive, Dropbox etc.) does not prevent us from the need for a backup, because these Cloud drives are not backup solutions. Any changes to documentation on our computer will cause a change on the Cloud drive, thus if we delete a file we won’t be able to restore it.  If some malicious person gains access to them and messes them up, we are forced to re do all the work as well. Ransomware affects them immediately and without proper backup we are spending huge amounts of money and effort to either recreate encrypted files or pay. When we pay, we cannot be sure such attack won’t happen again in the future…

These are just examples of things we need to take a look before we concentrate fully on starting our businesses. A smart entrepreneur will always have his or her bases covered!  We will talk about professionalism in the next part.  Stay tuned!

We offer free consultations so do not hesitate to contact us with any questions!

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