Nearly every business has an online footprint. Your employees likely use the internet on company computers as a part of their everyday activities. These online interactions create opportunities for hacking groups and online thieves to penetrate your company’s defences and steal your data or hold it for ransom. Every business needs to take steps to protect itself and its customers. Here is a quick guide on how to secure your business’s IT infrastructure.
Invest In The Best
The most important step to take toward securing your business’s IT infrastructure is to invest in high-quality and reliable programmes that give you the tools you need to shield your business from online attacks. Any business is vulnerable to nefarious online actors. Your business’s financial infomation, as well as your customers, is highly valuable to criminals. Online vandalism is a factor too, with many companies coming under attack from hackers that simply have nothing better to do than cause chaos.
One of the leaders in the industry is TSplus, with its TSplus Advanced Security solution. With just a few clicks, you can completely customise your online security, protecting yourself from intrusions from whole regions or countries. You can block automated login attacks that can cause servers to crash or systems to close down. This not only allows you to operate securely and with confidence, but it also reduces the amount of productivity that can be lost when in-house IT technicians are fixing problems or updating security. Using this software is a cost-effective solution to IT security.
Put Policies In Place
How your employees use your IT infrastructure and how they behave when working online can have a massive impact on your IT security. It only takes one spam email or one login to a suspicious site to allow an unauthorised intrusion into your system. From there, a hacker or online criminal can work their way through your data or even hold your infrastructure hostage. Good IT policies lead to better online practices that can protect your company and your productivity.
If you have an existing IT policy in place, review it carefully and look for ways to improve upon it. Technology is evolving all the time, and so are the methods that hackers and online thieves use to gain access to systems. If you have had an IT policy for a few years, it will probably need to be updated. Social media apps can be a route into your systems, but may not have seemed like a priority just a few years ago. Make sure your policy is up to date and takes into account developments in technology and the different ways your employees may be interacting with websites and apps.
Create Backups For Recovery
Even with the best policies and protective software in place, online attacks and intrusions can happen. These can corrupt your existing data or even prevent you from accessing it. One of the best ways to prevent an online threat from grinding your business to a halt is to make regular backups of all of your data. These can be used to bring your business back online in the event of a system crash or loss of data.
This should be a regular procedure in your IT team’s schedule. The more up-to-date your backups are, the quicker and easier it is to get going again if you have a problem. These backups can also be useful if there is an issue with your hardware that has not come from an outside actor. Information Technology infrastructure is reliable, but any server, computer, or IT hardware can fail and cause problems. Having a backup ready to go at a moment’s notice can save you a lot of time. You will be able to get the company back up to speed after the broken hardware has been replaced, or an alternate system has been implemented.
Proper Password Protocols
The most popular password in the world is 123456. The next most popular is 12345. If your employees do not take their passwords to your systems seriously, it can be a huge and easily exploited security flaw. When you are inducting new employees, and holding IT refresher events, you should underscore the importance of passwords and how each employee has a responsibility to use more complex combinations of letters, words, and symbols.
Password should be changed regularly. If you can implement two-factor authentication, this can be a very helpful tool to improve the security of your company’s IT infrastructure. It can also be more convenient for your employees. Many modern laptops and desktop PCs have fingerprint-recognition features that can be used as part of an internal two-factor authentication protocol. Facial recognition can also be used with webcams or through apps on a mobile phone. Taking this step makes your IT infrastructure more secure, and prevents you from being an easy target for hackers.
Taking these steps makes your business more difficult to attack online. Hackers are also slackers, they look for easy targets. By making sure that your business is not the low-hanging fruit, they will move on to someone else who is.
