5 Tips for Small Business IT Security

Running a small business can be stressful enough without worrying about technology issues and dealing with system security. It can be difficult to know where to start and what steps you should take with a limited budget and a small team of professionals.

These basic guidelines should help you understand where to start and what steps need to be taken.

1. Manage risk – Start by asking what information is most important to your business and what steps need to be taken to protect that information. Think what would damage your business if it was available to the public, like business logic or customer lists. What can you do today to protect that information?
2. Training – Determine the strengths and weaknesses of your team. If you don’t have an internal resource, hire someone to educate your team on the correct way to protect your critical data and how to identify common attacks, like email phishing and malware attacks. Create policies about social media and make sure your team understands how to use it in a secure way to protect the company.
3. System Updates – It takes considerable effort to keep yourself educated about new cybersecurity threats. It also takes effort to keep your computer systems updated to address the latest threats. Spend some time making sure updates are applied to user systems.
4. Routine Backups -System backups are the cheapest safety net you can ever have. Create an environment that encourages frequent system backups of critical systems. Once you identify those systems that are essential, verify the backup method works and test that the backups can be restored. Ransomeware can encrypt your entire network, blocking your access to critical data and systems, but an effective backup system can allow you to completely replace a compromised system without losing any data.
5. Hire a Professional – While it can be attractive to solve all your technology problems yourself, you should investigate if hiring a professional is a better option. Even a part-time employee, or a consultant solution, can add significant value to a technology project. Finding someone you can call to solve immediate problems, like a crashed system, can allow non-technical employees to focus on the business outside of learning about technology. One data breach could cost you your business much more than you will spend on a qualified professional.

5 Things That Will Kill Your Project

Project Management is a difficult task that has risks to success that have to be monitored and managed to insure success. There are 5 major risks to your project, and you have to understand each risk and be prepared to immediately address each risk to prevent putting your project in danger of failure to delay.

1. Project Risk
2. Complacency
3. Lack of Leadership
4. Unclear Objectives
5. Lack of Resources

You can read the details of each item here.