This post may contain affiliate links.Â
Many small business owners have adopted an ‘it’ll never happen to me’ mentality. The truth is, it can happen to you. Cybercrime affects thousands of businesses every year. Now could be the right time to explore custom IT solutions from a managed services provider when you learn about these critical yet all-too-common oversights.
High quality, affordable web content writing service
100% original and unique content
Website copywriting
Blog writing
Article writing
SEO writing
6 IT Oversights That Can Cost Your Small Business Dearly
1. Underestimating the Importance of Cybersecurity
Not all business owners see the value in cybersecurity measures or understand what they need to have. One study found that 45% of small business owners believed an anti-virus solution would protect them from all cyber attacks. Forty-one percent also didn’t have backup and recovery systems in place.
Underestimating the importance of cybersecurity can mean your business isn’t as protected against harmful threats as it could be. This could have catastrophic consequences.
2. Weak or Reused Passwords
We want to use passwords we can remember, but we also want them to be strong enough to be hard to guess by opportunists or cyber criminals. Weak and reused passwords can make it easy for people to gain access to information and money.
Rather than using the same password across multiple platforms and making it easy to guess, implement strong password policies within your business. Ensure all employees use password managers and multi-factor authentication (MFA).
An MFA means you’ll need to provide two or more factors to achieve authentication to access something, such as a password, a PIN, an ID device, and a fingerprint.
3. Inadequate Backup Plans
If your business were attacked by a cybercriminal or affected by a natural disaster or hardware failure today, would you be able to keep it up and running and maintain access to your data?
Not all small business owners have backup and disaster recovery plans in place. This means that if something catastrophic were to happen and you lost your business and client information, you may not get it back.
By investing in a backup solution on-site and in the Cloud and regularly testing it, you can feel confident should disaster strike.
4. Not Performing Updates
It can be tempting to hit the ‘ignore’ button when any software update notification pops up. However, there’s a reason those update requests exist. Vulnerabilities in the software have been found, and the patch or update is the fix.
Failure to perform those updates, or even simply delaying them, could leave your systems vulnerable. Keep your systems as safe as possible by implementing automated system updates to ensure you’re always up to date.
5. Ignoring Network Security
It’s not just your computers you must protect from cyber criminals; it’s your network. Do you have robust network security to protect your business? If you don’t have firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and secure WiFi, your systems can be exposed and at risk of attack.
6. Not Training Your Employees
We can take it for granted that our employees will know how to spot a cyber threat while using their computers and protect the business from it. However, that couldn’t be further from the truth.
The latest 2024 Data Breach Investigations Report by Verizon revealed that people are the problem. Out of all data breaches reported by businesses in 2023, 68% of them involved a non-malicious human element, like an employee falling victim to a social engineering attack. Train your employees in cyber protective methods, and protect your business from cybercrime-related losses.
If you don’t have IT solutions in place to protect your business from data breaches and cybercrime, make them your priority. The more measures you have in place, the more protected your company and its employees and customers can be.
Are you ready to create Something Spectacular?
Here, at Moss51 Art & Design, we specialise in SEO content writing for your business website or blogs. Your blogs and website pages need to look nice with well-written content to attract customers and search engines. Let’s talk.
We specialise in writing trustworthy website content for web pages and blogs.
I hope you enjoyed reading this article. Did you find the information on this post useful? Leave your comments below.Â
Print and share this article friendly; you are free to use and reproduce it, just please attribute Moss51 Art & Design as the original author, and link back to this post!
