Top 5 Cyber Security Solutions for Businesses of All Sizes

Could you afford to pay the price of poor cyber security solutions? According to recent statistics, the average cost of a data breach is $8.19 million in the United States.

This would be enough to put many companies out of business. Clearly, you need cyber security protection, but what does that look like for small businesses, medium businesses, or multinationals?

What are some essential cyber security solutions that every company can benefit from?

In this guide, we’re going to take a look at cyber security solutions that any company can take advantage of, no matter their size.

Are you ready to learn more and start making your business more secure? Then read on!

1. Antivirus Software

Many new pieces of malware are created every single day. If you want to stay safe, you need to have antivirus software installed on your work computers.

Good antivirus software should function proactively: it should be scanning your files in the background while you go about your work. When a new file comes in, your antivirus should be looking at it. You should also make sure that your antivirus software can run different kinds of scans: you should be able to run a quick scan as well as a full scan of your computer, at the very minimum.

You should also make sure that your antivirus software can use heuristics. This is a software module that allows your antivirus software to recognize probable malware that hasn’t yet been identified, which means that even if it’s brand new, it’ll be able to spot it and neutralize it.

Free or Paid?

While free antivirus is good enough for the home, it’s probably not good enough for a work computer. Not to mention that a lot of free antivirus programs aren’t licensed for use on business computers.

In general, paid antivirus programs usually come with additional features that business users need. These include email scanners, web filtering, and administrative features.

2. Assessment Software

If you want to secure your computer, you need to know what’s wrong with it in the first place. This is where an assessment tool comes in useful.

These tools can scan your computer and detect vulnerabilities that you might not know about. A vulnerability scanner can find out-of-date software, firewall rules that put you at risk, and more.

This kind of software is invaluable. The more of these security problems that you can patch, the safer your computer will be.

3. A Strong Firewall

You absolutely must have a firewall. This software stands between you and the internet, blocking attacks and regulating programs’ internet access. Yet simply having a firewall isn’t enough: you need to make sure that you’ve got it configured correctly, too.

Your firewall’s exact configuration will depend upon your computers and the software that you use. You’ll need to make sure that each program has the permissions it needs to function properly and nothing more. You also need to make sure that any programs that don’t need to access the internet can’t access the internet.

A firewall uses rules to manage a program’s internet access. If you’re not too sure about what a program needs, you should think about hiring a managed IT services company. These companies can take over the running of your firewall and make sure that it’s configured correctly, keeping you and your business safe.

4. Automatic Backup Software

Backups are of vital importance for any modern business. Let’s say that there is a disaster that knocks your computers out and your website offline, or ransomware infects your system and you can’t access your files. What are you going to do?

In both of these scenarios, the correct solution is to restore your computers and server from a backup. Yet few of us, even in the world of business, think to backup our computers manually.

This is where automatic backup software comes in. With this kind of software, you can specify what you want to backup and how often you want to back it up, and then rest easy, knowing that your files are safe.

The best backup software should also let you encrypt your files, so that if someone were to hack into the backups, they’d be unreadable.

You should make sure that you store your backups on a separate network from your main computers. This way, your backups are less likely to get infected by malware. Consider storing your backups in the cloud.

5. Two-Factor Authentication

People are bad at making passwords. Take a look at the list of the most common passwords, and you’ll see that most people still like using passwords like “abc123” and “password.”

While your company should have policies in place that can help employees make strong passwords, this isn’t enough. You need to employ two-factor authentication software, too.

Two-factor authentication is, put simply, an additional method of verifying a login attempt. The software can send a text message to a registered phone number for instance, complete with a one-time password that the user needs to enter to complete the login attempt.

Two-factor authentication can take other forms, too. It can use biometrics to confirm a login, it can require the user to use voice verification, and more.

Whichever type of two-factor authentication that you use, one fact remains true: it makes your business far more secure.

Cyber Security Solutions for Every Business

No matter the size of your business, you need to be using the cyber security solutions that we’ve mentioned. They can protect your computers and your network from malware attack and from employee negligence. Without them, your business is at profound risk.

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