What is your most important asset? Is it your product? Services? Your building? Your Patents?
The correct answer is that your most important asset is your data.
If you kept everything else but lost your data, could your business survive? Probably not. Even if you could you can imagine what a nightmare it would be to rebuild what you lost from scratch.
That’s why protecting your data is so important.
There’s a lot you can do to protect it, so if you want to discuss feel free to reach out to me. Cutting through all the multitudes of options though, there’s a bare minimum you should have in place.
Here are the 3 essential tools every business needs for cybersecurity.
1. Firewall
A firewall is just like it sounds. It’s a wall, a barrier, that separates your inside network from the outside. All traffic that comes in or goes out of your business passes through the firewall. Your firewall is your first line of defense against unwanted people digitally entering your business.
Also worth mentioning, when discussing protecting your business a consumer-grade firewall is not enough. Using what came from your ISP or picking up a firewall from your local electronics store will create problems for you. They just aren’t robust enough to protect adequately, and are also not meant for handling heavier data traffic in a business environment.
2. Password Manager
Password Managers are also just like they sound. They manage your passwords for you. Every credential you have can be stored securely so you don’t have to remember them. When you don’t have to remember them, then you can use extremely difficult, nearly impossible to crack passwords.
Which password is easier to remember?
“Password123!” or “pe@csRBtzxr4a3@CpxVX&^c59”
But which one is harder to crack?
The answer is obvious. Just for the record though, that randomly generated password would take 460 Octiliion years to crack. That’s 460 followed by 27 zeros.
The password manager will create those for you on the fly and fill them in with a simple click. You just need to remember one master password to have access to your password manager.
The Password Manager also makes it easy to have a different password for each account. If one account gets breached (there seems to be a new major data breach every day) you know your other accounts are still safe because they use different credentials.
Using a password manager is perfect for teams also. If something happens to one of your employees, you can ensure that you have access to everything they did, and also that they don’t.
Want to know more? Then you should grab our free business guide to password managers.
3. VPN
Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) are ways to make secure connections remotely. This is essential for any remote or hybrid work going on in your business.
A properly configured VPN gives your employees access to your work network (allowing them through your firewall) so they can work as if they are locally on the premises.
It also makes their data transmissions private, so the data cannot be intercepted by criminals. Hiding your device, location, and data transmission behind a VPN is essential, especially if your devices ever utilize public Wi-Fi networks, such as a coffee shop.
Wrap Up
This isn’t a checklist of 3 things to get and then your business is secure. These are the very basics of cybersecurity. I see these items missing from businesses frequently. It’s like leaving your front door wide open for any criminal to waltz in and do as they will.
There are a lot of factors to consider when creating your security plan. I almost made MFA (Multi-Factor Authentication) part of this list – an extremely secure policy that is frequently missing from companies. You’ll also notice I didn’t talk about backup either. Both are extremely important for protecting your business data.
At Xentric, we bake cybersecurity into everything we do. It’s not really a “product” we sell, as it isn’t that simple. True multi-layered security needs to be part of the foundational DNA of everything technology based in your company (and sometimes non-tech as well).
It’s important to create a security policy that fits your business. If you’d like help parsing through the available security measures, schedule a free consultation on our live calendar.