Company Security – Beyond the security guards
The year was 2014 and all seemed great for the Michaels Stores, yet on one January morning disaster struck when the company realized it had lost over 2.6 million payment card numbers. Despite the high number of security breaches in 2013 Michaels Stores was still not prepared for the attack, and the security breach has continued to damage their business and reputation. This isn’t exclusive to large businesses either, a small business can easily run into security troubles if it doesn’t prepare properly in this day and age.
Although having physical security for your business is certainly a necessity, there is much more that you have to consider outside of a couple of security guards. As a matter of fact, most of the theft that occurs today from a business standpoint is not done physically at all. In order to adequately protect your intellectual property as well as your physical assets, your company must invest in digital security as well as the physical security that you think you need.
Upgrading Physical Security Past the Security Guards
First of all, security guards are far from adequate physical security for most companies. You also need to protect your physical assets from the guards themselves as well as from outside ne’er-do-wells. Aside from guards, you should also invest in safes and lock boxes for any assets that cannot be replaced. In the best situation, you will also be able to these assets from plain sight. If this is not possible, you should showcase the lock prominently in order to deter criminals.
You should also have a monitoring system. This provides an additional level of protection against security as well as giving you legal backing for anything that happens inside of your company. The type of monitoring you will need will differ depending on your company. Some services can even replace security guards and are specifically built for construction security and auto dealership security, specialized services like Pro-Vigil can drastically cut your costs as well as improve your security. Check around to see if there are any services specialized for your business and you may be able to cut down on costs as well.
Digital Security
Once you have taken care of your physical security, you can towards a much more important form of security for your company. Digital security is the priority for any business with proprietary intellectual property. Outside of a you assets, most hardware can be replaced. The ideas of your business cannot once they have been stolen from you.
Most thieves prefer to go after your digital assets from the safety of their homes or from remote locations. Digital theft is much harder to track, so it reduces the risk while enhancing the reward. Here are a few of the top ways in which you can protect your business in the digital space.
First of all, you can invest in antivirus security for your computer terminals. This will help to eliminate many of the worms and Trojans that will steal your proprietary business information without you knowing. Having a good antivirus program on hand will bolster the efforts of all of your other digital security measures.
Make sure that you invest in a program that updates your antivirus libraries automatically. This is especially important if your office functions in an always-on Internet connection.
Consider placing your proprietary information in the cloud
You may believe that the cloud is less secure than having your information stored on your hardware. However, most of the newest security and encryption features are coming to the cloud first before they are put into hardware packages that can be purchased as a standalone product. If you want to stay on the cutting edge of security, the cloud is the place to be.
Many of the private companies that are doing security on the cloud have features that protect your information from government surveillance. These smaller companies will also have less of an incentive to help outside officials look for your information – many of them will even hide your information from the security company officials and servers themselves, completely separating your stream of data from their own. In this case, they will not even physically be able to help outside officials look for your information.
Another level of digital security that you should definitely consider is upgrading your web host. If you are transferring any kind of data through a network, then your web host is just as vulnerable as your individual hardware terminals are. You should also make sure that your web host is in an extremely remote location or has physical security for the servers themselves. Make sure that you are invested in a dedicated hosting solution, as many shared hosting solutions and VPS hosting solutions are physically incapable of protecting your data in the way that you wish.
About the Author:
Lee Ying has over 10 years experience in the tech and security industry. He currently writes for various websites, if you would like to contact him you can find him on LinkedIn. Follow him on Twitter @LeeYing101
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