What is Cybersecurity?

Technology plays a prominent role in business nowadays with the reliance on interconnected marketing, sales, management, and operations solutions. However, with technology come digital threats, such as hackers or viruses. If successful, these threats can put all of your business's and customers' private information, or even your company itself, at risk. Cybersecurity involves protecting yourself and your business from these attacks.

Importance of Cybersecurity in Business

When running a business, there is a numerous amount of digital data that needs to be kept safe from attacks, including customer, employee, financial, and confidential information. If security is breached and private data is released, it can lead to decreased customer trust, a damaged reputation, and potential financial losses. In addition, the compromised data could be used to harm individual users with their accounts used for malicious activities. To prevent this from happening, ensuring that your business implements proper cybersecurity methods is extremely important.

How can you Increase your Business's Cybersecurity?

There are many different digital access points in a business that could be hacked and attacked. Although these are often overlooked, basic cybersecurity tips are a great starting place. Make sure all passwords are unique, hard to guess, and are kept safely guarded. These elements should go for all accounts, whether for employee logins or banking. In addition, you can also make it so all employees must change their passwords after a certain amount of time, most commonly three to six months.

Your business should also consider adding two-factor or multifactor authentication to all accounts. Multifactor authentication requires the user to confirm using a different device that they are attempting to log into their account. For example, for an employee to log into their account on a computer, after successfully entering their password and credentials, they will need to confirm from their smartphone that it is them (and not someone else) logging in. This will add another layer of security to all of your business's accounts, making it much harder to hack.

Employees need to be aware of potential threats and know when there is one. A common type of cyber attack is social engineering, which is when someone is manipulated into compromising confidential and private information. In a business setting, this could mean that company data and security are breached. Emails containing malware or viruses are another type of threat that is easy to fall for. These are often disguised as real people or companies, making it hard to distinguish what is real or fake. To combat such threats, businesses need to require cybersecurity training for employees during the onboarding process. Some businesses even go as far as sending fake virus emails to their staff to test their reactions and take any needed training actions.