Almost every business today is connected to the Internet. This fact makes any company, large or small, a target for hackers, network attacks and malware. The biggest security threat to any company today is internal, and experts in the field suggest you protect your company by layering components in a full security strategy that includes technology, policies, procedures, and best practices.

The fact is that small businesses today face the same basic data protection challenges as large businesses. The dangers and potential costs of unprotected data can be catastrophic. Unfortunately, most of the time, <a href=”http://www.allcovered.com/business/”>small business IT</a> departments, if they have one, have far fewer resources to address the problem than larger businesses.

A multi-layered strategy is good for you

As branch offices proliferate and employees spend more time on the road or working from home, critical business data is being created and stored usually on a laptop or desktop away from the main office. According to an established IT research firm, most small businesses have less than four IT personnel and a storage budget of less than $50,000. In order to address data security threats and to ensure data protection, small businesses must first:

• Identify data loss vulnerability points, both electronic and paper-based
• Create and develop a data security policy. This should both protect all sensitive data and ensure its availability and restrict access.
• Communicate this data protection policy to customers as a strategy to strengthen the business–customer trust relationship. This also helps differentiate the company from competitors.
• Identify and deploy the right tools to protect sensitive data depending on their type of business.
• Know the steps to take if they believe to be a victim of a data compromise.

If you’re beginning your small business, it might be a good guess that your security strategy consists of simply a firewall and antivirus software. That may have been adequate several years ago, but a good security strategy should be multi-layered.

By layering security using complementary technologies, your small to mid-sized business IT services can address all of the threats it faces. For instance, firewalls and antivirus software may protect a company at the gateway, but they would be ineffective if an insider bypassed the gateway. E-mail and web filtering software would close this hole and add another layer to the security program. Intrusion detection and file monitoring solutions would also aid in detecting changes made to the system by malicious individuals.

Specific steps to implement layered security can vary between organizations, but a good place to start is with risk analysis. IT managers and (or in the case of small businesses without one) company owners need to take the following steps to establish the level of risk that their company faces:

• Identify the company’s network assets.
• Determine the value of each asset as well as the cost associated with its loss.
• Identify threats to each asset.
• Determine vulnerability to identified threats.
• Prioritize assets by level of importance.

Selecting your data protection provider

Needless to say, IT support is absolutely necessary for business data protection. It is highly recommended that you pick a company that truly understands the needs of a small business. The great thing today is that it is not necessary for IT technicians to be on site in order to service your IT network. This can be done remotely and has proven to work well.  IT support must be superb, because without great support the technologies used by a small company will be rendered useless; if it cannot be brought online immediately after a problem.

All Covered can assist you in determining the best security strategy for your company that minimizes the risks to your data, network and users. Contact us at 866-446-1133.