The digital age has brought about a whole new set of challenges for small businesses. While the internet can be an incredibly powerful tool to promote your business, it also brings cyber-security risks that threaten all aspects of your business operations.
To protect against these threats, it’s important to have the right strategy in place before you find yourself at risk. This article will discuss some tips on how to create a digital security plan for any small business!
Table of Contents
1. Objectives of the Security Plan
The first step in creating an effective cybersecurity plan is understanding what you’re trying to protect against. The objectives of a good cybersecurity plan include the following:
- Protecting business data from online threats, such as hackers and malware
- Preventing unauthorized access to company information
- Maintaining a good reputation by complying with security standards
- Controlling access to the network and servers
- Performing regular software updates
For a small business, these basic goals will give you direction as you build your cybersecurity plan.
2. Choose a Cybersecurity Team
You need to identify a digital security team that will be responsible for cybersecurity. This team should include people with the knowledge and skills to establish and improve digital security plans to assist employees in protecting their devices.
How you choose your cyber protection team depends on what makes sense within your organization. Consider factors such as:
- How many people are needed
- Will they need specialized training before taking on these responsibilities
- How much time can this group devote each day/week
3. Assessing Business Cybersecurity Risk
You must assess your risk of cyber-attack to create a strategy for protecting your data. Determine the likelihood of an attack by answering these questions:
- What is my company’s cyber threat exposure?
- How much danger will this pose to my business (e.g., loss of revenue, stock price)?
- What are the financial consequences if that information were breached or stolen?
- How susceptible is our personal/company info to being lost due to natural disasters – flooding and earthquakes, fires, etc.?
To create a digital security plan for your small business, it is important to identify the common cyber threats and mitigation strategies. Lean Six Sigma methodology is an efficient approach in determining how these threats affect your company’s data. Get this lean six sigma green belt course to learn more.
4. Cybersecurity Policies
Cybersecurity policies are a series of rules for protecting company data and assets. These policies should be created in conjunction with stakeholders to ensure they are effective enough.
Once you have your cybersecurity policy, make sure it is well communicated to employees so that everyone knows what to do if the company does get breached or hacked. Key cybersecurity policies include:
Password Policy: Set requirements for password strength.
Website Security Implementation: Website security should be the priority of a cyber security plan for small businesses. SSL makes a secure connection between the server and the browser. To get an SSL certificate, you do not need to search more as there are multiple options in the market starting from regular SSL to cheap wildcard SSL and so on. You just need to assess the site’s structure, and, on that basis, you can choose the type of SSL certificate and secure the website.
Data Classification and Handling Policies: Determine who has access to the data, what can they do with it, how long is it stored before being deleted?
Access Control Policies: Define protocols for granting employees access rights within various systems and networks.
Build an Effective Digital Security Plan
It’s time to take your digital security seriously if you haven’t already!
The measures we have discussed will help you put together a digital security plan that your company can follow. Your cybersecurity policy should work to protect all of the data and information at your fingertips, so make sure it is comprehensive enough for what’s needed.
For more tips about protecting your company’s data on the internet, keep visiting our website.
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