Starting and managing a business is quite a challenging task in itself, let alone dealing with the extra hassles involved. One needs to take care of quite a few things, including the capital requirements, employee management, ensuring an impressive rate of growth, and so on. However, sometimes, in the midst of all these business goals, one important factor involved in running a business effectively is often overlooked, which is its security.
This is one of the important reasons why we see so many cases of businesses falling prey to the evil intentions of people like burglars, thieves, and other harmful factors. Hence, it's probably the need of the day for businesses to safeguard themselves from all security threats. The below given are some of the highly effective security tips, which can go a long way in preventing such unfortunate situations.
Coming up with a set of important terms and conditions seem to be a wise thing to do for businesses about to start out. This is recommended to do before even starting to hire employees, as you would want to make them sign these terms and conditions on joining. These conditions should focus on protecting the business' property and sensitive information, by putting restrictions on sharing such information as well as ensuring that the business' property and resources are used in a proper and productive way only. You should also consider outlining the type of behavior and approach the business expects from its employees, and what the consequences can be on failing to abide by the conditions, or giving out private information to outsiders. Similarly, you may even want to make changes to these terms and conditions from time to time, depending on the changing requirements. While making the changes, you need to inform all your employees about the revised terms and make sure they are fine with the changes. Finally, consider putting up a list of some of the most important things you want your employees to keep in mind all the time. Make sure it's accessible by your employees freely.
Leaving unneeded private documents and client data as it is may land you in a vulnerable position, as the chances of someone getting hold of them increases. This may lead to a terrible outcome, especially if your client's personal information or other highly sensitive data's privacy is compromised on. Hence, it's recommended to get rid of such old and unwanted private documents and sensitive data from time to time. We are not just talking about the documents you store on your computer, as they are actually far more protected if you ensure the basic level of security on your systems such as keeping passwords. The problem may usually be caused by the information stored on paper, and hence you can consider resorting to a weekly or monthly shredding schedule to make sure such unwanted private and confidential data is disposed off.
Audits are a great way to find out about most of the security threats in your business, especially those related to privacy of important documents and client data. An audit should check all the documents stored on your employee's computers, as well as in paper form. This will allow you to discover areas that can be exploited easily, and need to ensure a higher level of security. After you come to know about such exploits, don't delay working on them. After all, this will only intensify the security threat further, as more people will get to know about such exploits. Make every possible measure to make sure to eliminate all the possible exploit areas, and even consider improving the overall security, especially if the audit points to a lower level of security. Finally, it's probably worth keeping in mind that unlike what a lot of employees and employers think, audits aren't for finding mistakes committed by your employees, or to act on any suspicion the employer might be having about them. Instead, it's to learn more about the security measures in place in your business, and improve the weaker security areas. However, you also need to let your employees know about your real intention of conducting an audit, as most of the time it may be taken in a wrong way by many employees. Finally, it's probably a good idea to conduct at least one audit in a year, especially if you have to take care of a lot of private and confidential data as well as client information.
Regardless of whether your business uses one uniform system or multiple ones, it's important to ensure they are used in a secure way, and have some restrictions in place. After all, most of the employee frauds are committed due to poor security of the systems within the business, which makes it easy for the employee to access restricted areas. First and foremost, it's a wise idea to assign a unique user-name to all your employees. At the same time, you should also ensure that they are allowed a limited access according to their job requirements, and should not be allowed to access things they won't need to use. This will help you know which areas of the system can be accessed by a particular employee, so that most of the cases of unauthorized cases can be avoided. This will also ensure that someone is always responsible for any wrong-doing that takes place through their computers. After getting done with the above step, you need to consider ensuring the security of the passwords of your employee computers. It's usually seen that most of the businesses don't bother with this, resulting in their employees setting extremely easy passwords. In such cases, it's possible for others, primarily the other employees, to know what their other workmate's password is. Hence, you need to make your employees set stronger passwords. This can be done easily by instructing your employees to set a password which contains at least one capital letter, one small letter, one number, and one special character. You can also tell them to avoid having a password which is something too common or easy to guess. Furthermore, you can even have some other security requirements in place, which needs your employees to change their password every 30 to 45 days, put screen lock when they are away from the system, and so on. These tips might seem rather basic, but it's surprising to see a lot of businesses overlook them. They can actually be pretty effective in preventing unauthorized use and improving your system's security if implemented in the right way.
Any business worth it's salt should have a set of emergency instructions in place, as unfortunate events don't need an invitation to take place. You should have a set of useful instructions for situations like robberies, theft, fire, and even natural calamities such as tornadoes, and put them at a place every one can see regularly and familiarize themselves with. The instructions should include the contact numbers of the police and other people whose services would be needed during emergencies. Furthermore, if the area surrounding your office is witnessing an increase in the number of such emergency cases, it would be a good idea to provide all your employees with some expert tips on how to deal with such situations. You can even consider calling a separate meeting for this purpose as well as seeking the help of an expert in this field to come and offer some useful advice for such situations.