The Benefits of Cybersecurity: What Can You Do To Keep Your Business Safe

What are the Benefits of Cybersecurity?

There are many benefits for organizations that practice good cybersecurity. From protecting against threats to maintaining brand trust, here are some key ways cybersecurity benefits businesses.

Protects You Against Threats

The most obvious benefit is protecting your organization against potential cyber threats. This includes external threats like hackers, malware, and phishing scams. But it also includes preventing internal threats from employees who may accidentally or intentionally cause issues.

By implementing layers of security like firewalls, anti-malware tools, and access controls, you can drastically reduce your risk of cyberattacks.

Allows You to Comply with Regulations

Many industries and businesses fall under regulatory requirements mandating a minimum level of cybersecurity practices. By implementing proper security policies and technologies, you can comply with regulations like HIPAA, PCI DSS, NIST, and more. This helps you avoid potential fines, lawsuits, and audits that come from non-compliance.

Maintains Business Productivity

Good cybersecurity helps your organization maintain productivity in the event of an incident. Security tools detect, mitigate and contain threats before they cause significant downtime and loss of data access.

Incident response plans ensure you can keep operating at full speed even during and after a cyberattack. This minimizes financial losses and business disruption.

Reduces Your Expenses

Cybercrime can cost organizations millions each year due to data loss, ransomware payments, operational downtime, client lawsuits and more. Security practices help reduce these expenses by preventing incidents and containing ones that do occur.

Over time, the costs of cybersecurity practices pale in comparison to what your organization could lose in the absence of security.

Maintains Trust in Your Brand

When clients, customers and partners trust your brand, it significantly adds to your bottom line. Cybersecurity helps maintain that trust by ensuring your organization is responsibly handling sensitive data and protecting people’s privacy.

A lack of security, data breaches and prolonged outages can quickly destroy trust in your brand – making cyber protection critical.

What You Can Do As a Business Owner

Every business, regardless of size, needs to take cybersecurity seriously as threats become more sophisticated and frequent. Here are some key recommendations for implementing security practices that can help protect your organization.

Use Strong Passwords and Change Them Regularly

This is one of the simplest yet most impactful security measures. Require employees to use long, complex passwords that are unique for each account. You don’t want a hacker to gain access to all your accounts if they get hold of one password.

And mandate changing passwords periodically, like every 3 months. A good way of keeping track of all your different passwords is to use a password manager, like Bitwarden which is open source.

Be Careful About Information Shared Online

Be selective about what information your organization shares publicly on websites and social media. Limit what you post about employees, operations, clients and projects, as hackers could use this data for attacks.

Keep Software Updated

Install software updates for applications and operating systems as soon as they are available. Updates often include security patches for vulnerabilities that hackers are actively exploiting.

Use a Firewall and Antivirus Software

Install a firewall to block unauthorized access to your network and servers, and use antivirus software on all machines to detect and remove malware. Keep both constantly updated to protect against the latest threats.

There are several good firewalls on the market, but if you want a simple solution, I recommend Cloudflare. It is easy to set up, very flexible in its configuration and doesn’t require CPU resources as it runs in the cloud and not on your server.

For the website I host, I use a 3-layer approach including Cloudflare, CrowdSec and a PHP-based firewall.

Beware of Phishing Emails and Scams

Educate employees to recognize and avoid phishing emails, spam and vishing (voice phishing) scams. Never click links or open attachments in suspicious emails, and never provide sensitive information.

Back Up Your Data Regularly

Establish a backup and disaster recovery plan that continuously backs up important data. Backups ensure you can restore operations quickly after ransomware attacks or data loss incidents. For servers, your hosting provider should offer you with some backup options.

Educate Employees on Security Awareness

Provide regular cybersecurity training for all employees to teach them security best practices and how to spot phishing attempts. Test their knowledge to reinforce key concepts.

Taking these basic but effective steps will drastically improve the security posture of your organization and reduce your risk of cyberattacks and data breaches. Reach out if you have any questions!