Five Security Measures your Business should be Taking

Keep­ing your busi­ness safe is no easy feat. Besides pro­tect­ing your web­site from hack­ers, there are phys­i­cal and online mea­sures you can take to ensure your busi­ness is safe.

Here are five secu­ri­ty mea­sures your busi­ness should be tak­ing:

1. If you give your employ­ees com­pa­ny phones and oth­er tech to work with, make sure they’re secured. Lap­tops, tablets and mobile phones con­tain so much valu­able data that if they get lost or stolen, your com­pa­ny could lose more than mon­ey; you could lose irre­place­able doc­u­ments. Any portable device that an employ­ee can take with them out­side of the office should be safe­guard­ed to avoid any loss of data.
2. Fran from account­ing loves cats. She loves them so much that she’ll click on any­thing that con­tains a cat pic­ture. Edu­cate your employ­ees about safe online habits so they – espe­cial­ly Fran – know what’s okay to click on and what can cause seri­ous harm to their com­put­ers. The best way to do this is ver­bal. Send­ing out emails telling your employ­ees to watch what they click on may not get read, but hav­ing a web safe­ty sem­i­nar pre­sent­ed by your IT depart­ment will be impact­ful.
3. Secure your serv­er room(s). You’ve prob­a­bly already secured your Wi-Fi® net­work – if you haven’t, get on that! – but what about your serv­er room? Lock the room or rooms that house your servers and only give the key or access code to peo­ple who absolute­ly need it.
4. Imple­ment crim­i­nal checks on all cur­rent and poten­tial employ­ees. This secu­ri­ty mea­sure is very impor­tant because although some­one may not appear to have a crim­i­nal past, they very well could be an expe­ri­enced hack­er wait­ing to over­throw your company’s serv­er and steal valu­able data. It seems extreme, but in our extreme­ly dig­i­tal world, it’s not far-fetched. Back­ground checks are offered to employ­ers via the RCMP and can let you know if the per­son you’re hop­ing to hire is a threat to your com­pa­ny. Depend­ing on what province you oper­ate in, crim­i­nal back­ground checks can cost as lit­tle as $20 per employ­ee.
5. Do not let deliv­ery peo­ple in. If you order lunch, meet the deliv­ery per­son out­side. A thief could very eas­i­ly dis­guise them­selves as a deliv­ery per­son and walk right into your office, steal impor­tant doc­u­ments and walk right out unde­tect­ed. If you have a recep­tion area, do not let deliv­ery peo­ple past that point. It’s always bet­ter to be safe than sor­ry. You don’t want a bur­glar to grab an unat­tend­ed lap­top from someone’s desk and hide it in a piz­za box.