Every single company holds sensitive, private information. This information relates to customers, order histories and payment details, employee information, supplier information, and much more. For businesses based in the capital, search for an IT support company in London to help you put up essential barriers to ward of potential cyberattacks that could cause a data breach. So for that, you have to secure your business against a data breach.
What is a data breach?
A data breach is where an unauthorized third-party gains access to confidential information through unlawful means. This covers everything from a cybercriminal hacking into the system of a business, down to an individual employee logging into a file without the required direct permission of a senior manager. The purpose of a data breach is to steal personal, and often sensitive, information about individuals, business processes, financial information, and other pertinent data. Data breaches can have wide-ranging consequences to a business.
What impact does a data breach have on a business?
The impact of a data breach will very much depend on the type of data breach that has taken place, the amount of information stolen, the type of data it is, and the size and scope of the business that has been targeted. A data breach on a small, individual level where a single employee may have accessed information they shouldn’t have, will be much easier to solve than a cyberattack by hardened cybercriminals where your entire system database and files have been compromised.
A data breach can cause revenue loss in the immediate instance, especially where company systems are disabled, or important information has disappeared. Encrypted data through a ransomware attack might cause further headaches, as well as the potential future costs of legal fees and regulatory fines depending on the size of the data breach and the type of data stolen.
It is understandable that a company might suffer reputational damage, especially if a data breach has stolen information pertaining to private customer information, addresses, payment details etc. It can take years to overcome a data breach, and some companies never recover.
How to secure your business against a data breach
1. Hire a professional IT support team
The first thing you should do is hire a professional IT support team, a company with the experience and necessary know-how to put in place robust cyber protection protocols that help you maximise security. In the same way that you hire specialists in important roles within your organisation to deal with all manner of things (from financial executives and accounts teams to marketing departments and management) you should have a specialist IT service in place. Technology changes constantly, it is evolving at all times. You need a team to stay one step ahead of potential cybercrimes committed against your company.
2. Separate personal and business
Every employee needs to ensure that their personal and business accounts are kept completely separate, and this goes for anyone at the head of the business too. Keep separate bank accounts and credit cards, different email accounts, and ensure you have different passwords for everything. It is so easy for a hacker if they infiltrate one account to find all the information is the same across personal and business – then suddenly there is access to a treasure trove of business information.
3. Limit access to information
The bigger your company gets the harder it is to retroactively implement a robust cybersecurity protocol. This is why it is so important to have them in place as early as possible. One way you can increase security is to restrict access wherever necessary, making information available only to those that need to see it. Alongside restricting access to data, you should also encrypt data.
4. Education and training
It is vital that your employees understand the risks of a data breach and the different ways in which they can help to improve cybersecurity within your company. After all, one of the most common ways a cybercriminal gains access to company information is through a genuine mistake by a single employee. Train your employees in how to create passwords that work, how to identify phishing scams, and be aware of all types of data security threats.
5. Be prepared for the worst
Hiring a specialist IT support team will help you to put a plan of action in place to respond to a data breach. Preventing a data breach is the ultimate aim of course, but you should also have a clear plan of action to act quickly and decisively should the worst-case scenario come to fruition.
Finding the right IT support company in London for your business needs will go a long way to helping your business protect itself from a potential data breach or cyberattack. There are numerous potential threats at any given time, and even a small business that is only just starting out on the journey needs to have some level of protection in place to help prevent a cybercriminal from stealing information and data that could be important. Personal, sensitive information could cause devastating consequences if stolen.
