Look around your commercial office, at the employees that work for you. The equipment they use can be modern, the servers you use fast and reliable, and the software and other programs they use for the daily chores be simple, smooth and flexible. All of this can come crashing down to earth like a screaming meteor because of one person. There are literally teams of hackers all over the world that have their own 9 to 5 job. They get up in the morning, have breakfast and seek to forcibly enter into data files of businesses. A lot of profit can be made by doing so, as stealing customer credit card data is going to give them access to a lot of money.
Other businesses can buy customer data in bulk from them, so that your customers become their customers. It’s a deep dark world that too few entrepreneurs and small business owners take seriously. Are you sure you’re ready for hackers that might attack your business?
Good house manners.
Although your employees should be encouraged to work at home sometimes, keep them from having easy access to your hardware. If they need USB discs or storage hard drives, ask them to buy their own and bring the work they do at home into work. Of course, cloud storage should be the norm, however sometimes you need them to do work that is also on their personal clouds. You may need your business cloud space as you’re taking on multiple projects at once, therefore having a hard drive is useful.
However, even employees can try to steal data, so it’s sensible to have good house manners and keep those away from the office slightly at bay if you need to. Have an automatic log off system in place for every computer in your office, so anyone leaving their desk longer than expected doesn’t give anyone not authorized access to their account.
Profiles and money don’t go together.
Customers should be given the opportunity to create their own profiles in your business website. They can be a member of the club as it were, and be able to write comments on your blog posts, buy from your ecommerce store, and be the first stop they make when they want to mingle with fellow customers in the community. However, any kind of credit card or personal data they wish to store with you should be kept on a private server. Consider taking advantage of a low cost vps in order to maintain a strong resilience against cybercriminals. They’ll be searching for vital information on cloud storage servers. It’s far more difficult to attack private servers that are owned by specialist companies with great security. Relatively inexpensive, a vps provides extra security but still allows customers to access their data. This means they can still make purchases regularly without having to go through firewalls. They won’t be any the wiser but they will have a guardian watching over them.
Keep profile information separate from serious data such as credit cards used to pay for products and services. Keep and run a tight ship so that workers cannot steal data nor lose it by malpractice.
