As a business owner in the 21st Century, your website is the foundation of your business identity. This is why knowing that in the past 5 years cyber attacks on business websites have increased 68% must make you very concerned.
Still, many owners take their business internet security for granted and underestimate the damage that can be caused by cybercriminals. Businesses must move on from reactive cybersecurity measures to following preventive cybersecurity tips for creating a future proof security strategy for themselves.
What this essentially means is that businesses, rather than waiting for a security breach to happen and then taking action. They must deploy a comprehensive medium to a small business cybersecurity plan to safeguard their interests and prevent such breaches from happening.
Use A Trusted Platform
Building a CMS platform from scratch to host your website on, is not a feasible task for small to medium businesses. Thus using a trusted platform is the quintessential first step towards better business internet security.
The best part is the fact that the internet is filled with multiple CMS options to choose from. For example, if you’re an eCommerce business, then you have two of the best CMS platforms to build your store from – WooComerce and Shopify.
For more general-purpose websites, businesses can use trusted platforms like WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, etc. All these platforms have many ready-to-go cybersecurity features and also have a big roster of both free and paid cybersecurity plugins.
Take Steps To Educate Your Employees on Cybersecurity
A chain is as strong as its weakest link, and the weakest link in your website’s security chain is the humans behind it. Close to 90% of cybersecurity breaches/attacks happen due to human negligence or error.
Therefore in order to fully protect your online interests, you must make it mandatory for your team to go through a cybersecurity education program. These cybersecurity tips should be kept in mind while educating your employees;
- Employees must log off from all official accounts in internal & external systems when they finish their respective work.
- No web or native application must be added to any internal system of the company, without the approval of upper management.
- Employees must be prohibited from using personal devices for office work.
- While working off-site employees must use a VPN (Virtual Private Network) to encrypt their network traffic.
- Companies must use shared cloud storage solutions to store and transmit data inside the company. E.g. – DropBox, Google Drive, AWS, OneDrive
- All employees must use strong passwords with multiple upper & lowercase letters along with special characters.
Make A Habit Of Creating Backups
The task of always keeping your guard up is next to impossible. Even the most watchful of businesses will inevitably fall victim to nefarious cyber activity, sooner or later.
Depending on the severity of the attack, a business may lose a considerable amount of money. Thus data backups must play a precautionary role in a medium to small business cybersecurity plan.
This data should include system-critical files, databases, operational files, etc. The goal of a data backup is keeping your company alive when a server cyber attack cripples your systems and forces you to down your servers.
Utilize Professional Security Services
Staying vigilant all the time isn’t possible for many business owners. Handling the day-to-day operations, managing the growth, and envisioning the future takes about most of the time of a business owner.
By partnering with cybersecurity companies who provide wide-spectrum security solutions, business owners can drastically cut down on stress and additional workload. From encrypting your website to storing your website’s data securely a good cybersecurity partner will do all.
In Conclusion
In the end, we would only like to remind businesses that the threats to your website are very real. Thus you must take comprehensive steps to safeguard your business interests on the internet.
Businesses can go a long way in securing their website by incorporating strong encryption and cybersecurity measures into the website design and development process, by partnering with a skilled and experienced web development agencies.
