Overview
This article discusses ten top ways of protecting your business assets including the company data files, online information, financial records and equipment. The cost of having your business unavailable or offline is expensive and sometimes causes loss of clients or prospective clients.
1. Document Your Business
Having a technical support guy you know or dont know arrive onsite and start working on your computer is much easier if you have some basic documentation for them to work with. Some key things to make note of includes vendor phone numbers, warranty and service membership details, configuration settings of your router, switch, desktop network settings, application specific settings, software product keys and any non administration passwords. As a best practice you should keep this information stored offsite and have a trusted employee with the administration password including yourself.
2. Credit Monitoring Service
Your company and personal credit reports can change for many unknown resons including identity theft and in some cases mistakes the credit bureaus make. You want to catch these errors as soon as possible and have them corrected. If your credit is affected due to identity theft the longer it goes the bigger mess you will have to clean up later.
3. Offsite Storage and Online Backups
Online backups automate, secure and save your data to a failover designed data center running 24 hours a day. The process will determine what files have changed and transfer them overnight. The data transfer is encrypted and secure across the internet.
The data center infrastructure is extremely reliable and makes restoring files easy. You should hace copies of all your windows system disks, application and equipment install disks copied and offsite. In addition it would be a good idea to make a copy of all your data files offsite once a month.
4. Buy a Shredder
Spend some money on a good paper shredder. Credit card statements, personal documents and anything with business and personal information needs to be shredded daily. Having a shredder that can shred hundreds of documents makes it easy and fast. There are some services that will take your bags of documents and with larger business that could be necessary however with small business the security and cost effectiveness of your own shredder is suggested.
5. Reputation Defender
This company is similar to life lock protecting your online information. The service reputation defender offers is focused on information concerning your business and personal that happens to be incorrect. They have a partnership with peoplefinders.com that control billions of public records online. Any google of your name or company should be clean of any false information.?
6. Configure Restore Points
Current versions of Windows have a feature called restore point. It is a system recovery tool allowing you to restore your desktop or laptop to the last working point if your having problems with starting and running windows or any software. keep in mind this will restore windows to the specific time when the restore was run. As a result you should run restore point when installing windows and anytime you install new software.
7. UPS Protectors
Some parts of the country have alot of problems with lightning and in some rural places the electrical power is somewhat erradic with alot of fluctuating dips. The surge protector strip is a good start and useful for your home computer however business systems should be plugged in to an uninterruptible power supply (UPS). This is a battery backup that keeps your system going during a power outage and protects your equipment from power spikes.
8. Internet Security and Antivirus Software
Scan the new internet security software packages and you will notice alot of new terms such as phishing, malware, spyware, adware, identity protection, spam blocking and sonar. The old antivirus software is still integrated however newer services have been added. Mcafee and Norton are industry leaders in this field.
9. Norton Ghost
Making a snapshot copy of everything on your hard drive makes restoring that much easier. This is often used in conjunction with online backups to restore windows system install and copy the newest data files from the online service.
10. Flood Insurance
Floods can happen anywhere such as a river overflowing or the water pipes above you that burst?overnight and end up all over your equipment. Purchase some flood insurance to help with restoring your business.
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