Cybersecurity is not a new challenge for business. However, the rapid shift to remote working during the pandemic exposed many businesses, making them more vulnerable to attack as employees utilise different access procedures and devices from home.
It has never been more important for business leaders to protect their clients’ and employees’ data. A large part of ensuring cybersecurity is education – raising employees’ awareness of potential cyber threats and personal responsibility whilst working at home.
However, protecting your business to ensure long term business resilience needn’t be difficult or expensive – often new IT infrastructure is not required. Of course, no two businesses are the same and therefore bespoke solutions are always the most effective way of maximising your company’s cyber security, but we would always recommend that at the very least, businesses:
- Undertake Cyber Essentials Certification. This can be done in one working day and will ensure your business’s cybersecurity reaches a minimum benchmark when it comes to malware, antivirus, email, and data security, amongst other things.
- Provide employees with user awareness training. Humans are considered the weakest link in any organisation’s digital security system. They make mistakes, forget things and often fall for fraudulent practices. User awareness training is a highly effective way of educating employees on critical issues to ensure proper procedures are followed, thereby reducing risk and keeping your organisation’s data safe. Business leaders should actively engage in this training as well, and lead from the front.
- Protect personal and business devices from malware. Devices, both company-owned and personal, are synchronised with corporate networks to gain access to official information. This information needs to be guarded in several ways, but mainly through encryption, anti-virus and a decent firewall.
- Back-up data. The purpose behind online backup is simple and straightforward: to protect business information from theft, fire or other kinds of disaster. An online backup service is beneficial for businesses because it enables you to gain access to your data without restrictions on time or location. Several copies of data in different locations, including cloud storage, provides the assurance that all your information has protection if an unfortunate incident occurs.
- Provide email protection. Phishing is one of the most sophisticated online scams and is rife in certain industries – particularly travel. For instance, attackers are prone to creating fraudulent holiday refund emails and insurance scams to claim customers’ money. Email protection software can be installed on personal and company-owned devices and helps to prevent inbound spear-phishing, malware and spam emails entering your employees’ inboxes.
- Deploy multi-factor authentication. These solutions are easy to deploy, and this dual authentication is much harder for hackers to get around.
We have transformed over 2,000 clients’ organisations through cloud-based solutions that are tailored to enhance efficiency, flexibility, security and customer loyalty, and we would always recommend that businesses ask themselves what their next normal is. Business leaders must understand that. How they want employees to work in the future is essential in to build in long term business resilience through the correct cyber security solutions that flex and change in line with your company – in today’s world, there is simply no excuse for short term solutions.
