10 Ways to Best Protect Your Business
When you work hard to create and drive a business to success, you want to protect it at all costs. Here are 10 of the best ways you can protect your business.
Conduct All Relevant Risk Assessments
Risk assessments are essential for the safe running of your business. Not only does this mean a physical risk assessment of your business property or premises, but it also means a digital risk assessment in order to best protect your online practices.
Therefore, be sure to have any and all assessments taken out to identify potential risks to your business, so that you can then work to avoid them.
Secure Your Physical Premises
If your business has a physical property, whether a brick and mortar store, or whether you have an office or warehousing facilities, then these will need to be secured in the best possible way. You should think about:
- Secure locks on all doors and windows
- Secure fire exits
- Having a CCTV system in operation
- Having an entry system for visitors
- Having a designated system for those responsible for locking up at the end of the day
- Having an alarm installed
- Secure barriers, such as high-security fencing or walls
You should also think about protecting your physical premises in other health and safety ways, such as fire alarms, fire extinguishers and sprinklers.
Set Up Cyber-Security Precautions
No matter whether your business operates online on a daily basis, or whether you use the internet for small matters such as financing or other tasks, you still need to set up cyber-security measures. This means a dependable firewall and security system to protect against hackers and identify threats.
Teach Your Employees About Cyber Safety
Whether you have a large team of employees or a very small one, each and every employee should feel safe and comfortable staying safe online. You should take the time to implement proper training for all staff members about how to safely use the internet whilst remaining online throughout the business day.
This can include how to identify spam or threatening emails and when not to click downloads or open files from unknown sources. This education should also include the importance of safe browsing and better online practices, so as not to do anything which could compromise sensitive business data or risk opening a doorway to cyber criminals.
Protect Your Marketing Collateral
As a business, you’re going to have an extensive amount of digital and marketing assets that you need to protect. This could be in the form of online landing pages, blog posts, business stories and more. It’s important to know how best to manage your marketing collateral and protect it in order to ensure that all the information you produce online and your business’s identity are fully secure.
Use Strong Passwords
With so many operations requiring passwords, it can be easy to use passwords which are very simple to remember, and to duplicate these passwords for various uses. However, using very simple passwords which are used for the majority of your business operations will increase the risk of your passwords being able to be guessed or hacked.
Instead, create strong passwords, and be sure to change your passwords for different uses. Try not to duplicate any passwords if you can help it. Strong passwords should include:
- Letters and numbers
- A mix of uppercase and lowercase letter
- Use of punctuation
- Random words and not ones which can be easily guessed, such as using your own business name or something obvious or generic
Always Backup Your Data
Your business will be at extreme risk of losing essential data if you never incorporate a backup system on a daily basis. If something was to go wrong with your business database and you did not have a backup of all relevant information, then all this information will be lost should the worst happen — which, needless to say, will significantly compromise your business.
Be sure to have a proper backup system in place, such as backing up to the Cloud. This allows a safe, off-site backup of your data which can be be done automatically, so that you don’t have to worry about it.
Have a Clear Internal Management Structure
Delegating specific tasks to team members and having a hierarchy will make it clear who is in charge of certain responsibilities. This will make it easier to secure your business systems and ensure that no job is ever neglected, and that team members are never confused regarding who is responsible for a specific task.
It’s therefore a good idea to have a clear management structure, wherein delegated individuals have certain responsibilities which protect the business, such as being in charge of data backup, being in charge of locking up the business premises, or having certain permissions to access specific data when other people may not.
Register Your Trademark and Domain
Your business name and your website name need to be protected to ensure that nobody can misuse the information or steal your business name to use as their own. As soon as you have developed your business name, brand and domain, as well as any other corresponding information such as a business logo, be sure to register and trademark it so that you can securely use it without anybody else stealing it.
Have Clear Terms and Conditions
Anything you do within your business, whether it’s with clients, suppliers or your employees, should be done with clear terms and conditions in mind. This prevents the risk of misunderstanding, or individuals taking advantage of vague conditions, such as clients taking a long time to pay outstanding invoices.
It’s therefore important to always have clear terms, such as a clear payment date for any invoices, conditions of any sale, or terms and conditions within an employee contract so that everything is laid out clearly to protect all parties involved.
Anything which is not specified clearly in an agreement can easily be used against your business.
