How To Protect a Digital Age Business

Running your own company can really take its toll, especially in the digital age. Modern businesses have many advantageous tools at their disposal, but reliance on these tools can be a double edged sword. Here’s what you need to know in order to implement modern technology into your business without regretting it down the road.

Information Technology

The technology of today is incredibly advanced and capable of some truly great things, but there is also a weakness inherent to complex machinery of all kinds. These machines will naturally degrade with use, because they’re made up of many different moving parts, and the same is all the more true of computers that often feature incredibly delicate innerworkings. In order to protect yourself from hardware malfunctions that can cost you time and money, you’ll need to hire IT professionals.

You can hire IT personnel for your company, but doing so will require a thorough vetting process for each potential hire and, after you’ve hired a team, making sure that you don’t lose these valuable team members. On the other hand, you can outsource your IT needs to a third part company such as Mustang IT company in order to ensure that your IT department is well trained and, if all else fails, easily replaceable.

You might think that the need for IT workers is overblown, but there are two major reasons that they’re actually becoming even more necessary, rather than less. For one thing, hardware malfunctions and the resulting downtime can be surprisingly devastating to a given business, so having a staff on hand that can address these problems quickly is essential. On the other hand, even an ideal situation will require a robust, confident IT team, because the technological infrastructure of modern businesses means that keeping up with your competitors requires increasingly complex solutions, and protecting yourself from the possibility of something going wrong is of the utmost importance.

Cybersecurity

While protecting your hardware is crucial, it’s also important to protect your business and your customers from hackers. Hackers have an ever expanding bag of tricks that can make it difficult for even the pros to stay safe, let alone lay people with no real online literacy to speak of. For example, your website can be incredibly vulnerable to hacking techniques simply by virtue of lacking encryption and decryption protocols. These features aren’t a given, and you’ll need to purchase certification if you want to prevent your website from becoming a hotbed of malware. On a similar note, APIs can make developing an app for your business simple and cost effective, but it can also compromise the security of your app. This means that you’ll need to invest in API security if you want to keep your customers safe.

Your clientele will be the target in most cyber attacks, and it’s those customers that generally draw hackers to businesses in the first place. E commerce has made it so that a larger percentage of shopping is done online than ever before, and that can leave a "paper trail" that makes businesses a veritable gold mine for hackers who can use that personal and financial information to commit identity theft or simply sell that data to the highest bidder.

It’s also important to minimize the risks involved with login security, and there is a growing contingent of businesses that prefer to use multi factor authentication or passwordless login. This is largely because a good password for users is also a good password for hackers, because the factors that make it easy to remember give hackers a place to start when trying to crack the code.

Commerce in the digital age is marked by greater efficiency and reach, but that also comes with the ever present threat of hardware problems and cyber attacks. In order to stay competitive without putting your company at risk, you’ll need to invest in technological expertise and software solutions. These tips will help you lay out the groundwork for a more secure business.

Brett is a 43 year old father of 2 boys. Has a degree in Business Management and enjoys learning about emerging business trends. In his free time he writes about his experience with business and emerging trends.