In the old days, the only threats that business owners had to worry about were thieves and unruly customers. Sure, they could do real harm to your establishment, but the solutions were much easier to implement. Hire a security guard, reinforce the windows and doors, etc.
However, businesses today operate both offline and online. As a result, threats become much more insidious and tricky to counter. The anonymity with which hackers and bad-faith actors enjoy also leaves many businesses vulnerable. If you run a business and haven’t given much thought to protecting it from threats, it’s time you did.
In this article, we will look at three ways you can ensure you keep your business safe both online and offline.
1. Make Use of Access Control and Check-in Systems
Ultimately, all threats need an entry point or a vulnerability. On the offline side of things, you want to ensure that access to your business isn’t a free-for-all. Ensure that sensitive sections of your business, whether they are server rooms or employee workstations, are clearly demarcated.
The only people who get to access them need to be vetted employees of yours. Yes, you could hire someone to stop unauthorized access, but it’s not a foolproof strategy. People can be manipulated, distracted, and tricked.
This is why you often see major businesses make use of access control and check-in systems.
Both options work together to ensure that visitors and customers don’t have unfettered access, even for a moment, to areas they don’t need. In other words, a customer check-in system isn’t just for the customer’s convenience. It also ensures that you have a clear overview of who is visiting your premises.
As Greetly states, such systems provide your team with real-time alerts the moment a customer arrives.
Likewise, access control systems ensure that you have a log of the date, time, and identity of people who have had access to areas with workstations and server rooms.
2. Invest or Upgrade Your Cybersecurity Division
Any business in 2024 that wants to protect itself takes cybersecurity seriously. So, if you don’t already have a dedicated cybersecurity division, you should consider investing in one today. Unsure what steps to take? Well, start off by appointing a Chief Information Security Officer (CISO).
This person should have experience in cybersecurity and risk management. You can work with your CISO to start building a cybersecurity team that will be made of security analysts, incident responders, ‘pen-testers’, and security awareness trainers.
If you feel like that last position is something you can skip, think again. Most of the time, businesses become vulnerable because an employee somewhere in the chain messes up. They may have clicked a link in a phishing email and compromised the entire network. Thus, ensure that every one of your employees is trained in following proper cybersecurity protocols.
2023 was particularly bad when it came to data breaches. If businesses want to avoid a repeat of the same situation, cybersecurity needs to be taken more seriously. If your business doesn’t have the budget to build a full-fledged team, you can still look into managed cybersecurity services.
So instead of paying wages for an in-house team of experts, you can spend about $2,000 to $3,500 per month on a contractor that will get the job done. $3,500 every month sounds like a lot, but it’s a fraction of the cost if you were to pay for your own team.
3. Don’t Overlook Conventional Surveillance
At the end of the day, old-school CCTV cameras can be one of the best investments you can make for your business. Not only are they relatively affordable and easy to set up, but their presence alone acts as a massive deterrent to most on-premises threats.
Moreover, it’s worth keeping in mind that people who try to harm your business will seek to survey you first. They want to know how easy a target you are.
If it appears that it’s going to be too much work to beat your security, they would rather move on to someone else. In other words, CCTV cameras carry out the dual role of giving you actual usable onsite monitoring capabilities while also working as a deterrent for potential attacks.
In conclusion, protecting a modern business involves defensive measures on the offline and online fronts. We know that hackers look for vulnerabilities during their planning stage, on both fronts, to carry out a security breach.
Thus, investing in cybersecurity, access control systems, and good old surveillance cameras all contribute to your business’s overall security. That said, remember that if someone really wants to breach security, they will find a way.
This means that if there are business secrets or confidential information you want to protect, ensure that a single hack isn’t going to compromise it all.
image generated by Microsoft designer
