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While most business owners understand the importance of looking after their data, that doesn’t mean they do. In fact, many business owners don’t know how and regularly make mistakes regarding its care.
Awareness of data protection mistakes can put you in a robust position to avoid making them. Take note of these common mistakes and help your business remain secure in the digital age:
Mistake 1: Handling Your Own Cyber Protection
With the goal of saving money, you might not want to explore IT consulting from a managed service provider and have a third party handle your cyber protection. Instead, you might install an antivirus program and be satisfied with how you’ve protected your business.
However, handling your own cyber protection isn’t always a wise idea. You don’t get to enjoy the expertise of industry professionals who know how to stay ahead of the latest cybersecurity threats and attacks.
You also don’t have the benefit of 24/7 monitoring and response, which can mean that serious threats can go unnoticed for hours, days, or even weeks.
Mistake 2: Assuming All Threats Are External
While most cyber threats to a business are external, that doesn’t mean all of them are. Your business can also be at risk from insiders. Insiders are people who have authorized access to your resources, including personnel, networks, systems, equipment, and information.
In many situations, threats aren’t intentional. Instead, they can be accidental or negligence. An accidental threat could be opening an attachment in a phishing email or mistyping an email address and sending sensitive business documents to a competitor. An example of negligence can be ignoring IT policies and losing portable storage devices with sensitive information.
Mistake 3: Not Performing Regular Updates
It’s no secret that seeing a notification pop up on your screen about performing a software update can be frustrating. You may be more likely to hit the ‘ignore’ button than to start the update.
However, delaying or ignoring updates to critical systems and software can put your business at risk. In most cases, these updates exist because vulnerabilities have been identified in previous versions. Establish an automated patch management process if you know you won’t be consistent with running updates.
Mistake 4: Not Prioritizing Robust Passwords
The simpler our passwords are, the easier they generally are to remember. That also means they’re easy for attackers to crack. Once they do, they can be inside your software or system, causing chaos.
This is a common mistake that businesses make. In fact, studies have found that employees at large companies use easy-to-crack passwords, with ‘password’ and ‘12345’ being among the most commonly used.
Mistake 5: Not Backing Up Your Data
Many business owners adopt an ‘it will never happen to me’ mentality. They don’t think their business will ever be the target of a cyberattack, so they don’t always back up their data. This can mean that businesses can lose all their valuable data during a cyberattack.
Data loss can significantly impact businesses. Stock prices can sink, credit ratings can be downgraded, and some companies can ultimately go bankrupt. To reduce the risk of these issues, you can create multiple copies of your data in different locations, such as the cloud and on-site.
We all make mistakes, but some mistakes in business are more catastrophic than others. Avoid making these common data protection errors above to give your business a fighting chance of avoiding costly hacks and attacks.
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