There’s a pretty good chance that you have a lot invested in your business. This doesn’t just mean financial investment either. You will very likely have put a great deal of blood, sweat, and tears into your business and will have a great deal of emotional investment in it as well. However, despite this fact, many business owners still seem to ignore some of the most important and fundamental ways that they should be protecting their business. Often these things end up being ignored because things seem to be going fine. However, if you’re not thinking about the safety and security of your business, then you’re putting at some potentially serious risk. Here are four of the most common areas where business owners fall down and end up putting their businesses at risk.
Physical Security
This is an especially significant issue for those who run very small businesses, perhaps out of their homes. Larger businesses invest huge amounts of money in physical security measures, and yet smaller ones tend not to be as concerned. Of course, a smaller business is never going to be able to afford the kinds of security measures that huge companies can, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t things that you can do to protect your business premises. Even things as simple as floodlights and dummy cameras can be incredibly effective. If an intruder feels as though they’re being watched, then that can often be enough to discourage them altogether. There are also plenty of affordable alarm systems that you can use in order to add that extra layer of security to your premises. This applies to both office spaces and your home if your business is particularly small. Just because you’re running the business out of your spare room doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t make sure that it’s protected.
Digital Security
While physical security is something that business owners have been concerned about for as long as businesses have existed, there’s a new threat that far too many businesses are failing to take seriously: cyber crime. Much of the crime committed against businesses these days takes place without the perpetrator ever having to come within a hundred miles of your premises. This is because there are criminals who work day and night to break into your network and steal money, information, and anything else that they can get access to. There are plenty of different ways to protect against this kind of attack. Keeping your antivirus software up to date is one of the simplest, but there are also some more advanced methods that you can use. Netverify’s identity verification service is an anti-fraud technology for online businesses that uses multiple layers of defense so that you can be sure that you know exactly who it is that’s interacting with your business. Of course, the simplest and most obvious method that you can use for keeping your business safe is your employees. Make sure that you create a culture of security where everyone takes care to keep their passwords and information secure all of the time. This simple step can make life a great deal easier for you and your employees.
Unsecured data
The other major shift that has occurred now that we live in the internet age is that storage has moved from physical spaces to entirely digital ones. This comes with a number of advantages. The first is, of course, that of space. You no longer have to fill up your office with filing cabinets and piles of documents. The other benefit is that your data is now incredibly easy to access. However, one of the biggest problems that many businesses run into is that they fail to secure their data properly which leaves it vulnerable. It doesn’t even need to be an attack from outside. If your system has any kind of malfunction that erases your data, then you could find your business collapsing entirely. Things like cloud storage are a great way to avoid this because they offer a safe and secure place for you to store all of your data without sacrificing the ease with which you and your employees can access it.
It can often seem as though many of these things take a great deal of time without showing much benefit. After all, if all goes well, you’ll never actually need any of these measures in place. While that is true, it’s always better to have these kinds of measures and not need them than it is to need them and realize that you don’t have them at all. While the investment of time and money that they require might be significant, it’s far less hassle than dealing with results of not having them in the first place.
