There is a growing need to keep your business secure, whether this is physical business or an online business – as entrepreneur’s invest a lot of time, money and effort into growing their business; yet all it takes is one major security breach to unravel all that hard work.
- EMPLOYEES
From a security perspective, your employees should be the custodians of security, rather than a security risk – but all too often, it’s the staff of a company that are often responsible for the most significant loss.
For instance, from a retail perspective, the staff are often worse for stealing than many of the customers as they are in the empowered position to ‘get away with it’. Similarly, in the more corporate world, the prospect of corporate espionage is rife. You therefore need to be mindful of the fact your staff might not always have your best interests at heart – particularly if they feel wronged by you or your company.
There’s also the possibility that some people might infiltrate staff, which is where things such as IAM managed services come into play which stands for identity and access management.
The other thing to consider, with regard to protecting your business, is that an employee can have your best intentions at heart but be negligent in their duties – which could open you up to a huge lawsuit, for which you would be vicariously liable.
Vicarious liability means that you are ultimately responsible for the actions or inactions of your employees. It’s therefore vita to ensure adequate staff training is in place, both to reduce the risk of such negligence and to mitigate culpability should a claim be made against you.
- GET GOOD INSURANCE
A decent business insurance policy can be worth its weight in gold, as whilst the premiums can be rather high, if you are faced with a financially devastating emergency – in theory – the insurance policy provides a safety net to compensate your loss.
- PROTECT YOUR DATA
Protecting your data is extremely important, not just from a compliance perspective with new regulations now in place, but on the basis most of your hard work will be stored digitally. Indeed, some documents have had hundreds of hours spent on them, but all it takes is a virus, physical incident, or malfunction to ensure that intellectual asset you have created is lost forever.
It’s therefore a good idea to back up key documents to the cloud, using applications such as Dropbox or Google Drive.
In summary, protecting your business is a somewhat holistic art in the sense that it’s not just about protecting yourself from theft or financial loss associated with negligence – there are so many risks that we prefer not to think about, as otherwise, we would never leave the safety of our beds… we tend to live in a state of naive denial where we presume nothing bad can happen; for instance, the person that doesn’t back up their mobile phone – thinking they will never have it stolen – to then lose all their precious memories.
The point is, as the scouts say, “be prepared”. You don’t want to get to a place of paranoia, but you do want to be prepared in order to protect your business.
