How much would you pay to keep your business from being destroyed? No doubt that if you are a small business owner that wants to become a name in every household, you will do almost anything. The endless sleepless nights, the relentless worry and the down to earth hard work got you where you are now. Yet, why don’t you have a good data protection system? You could be thinking ‘well, who would want this data?’. If only the world of business could understand the minds of cybercriminals and rival business leaders who have no issue with doing dirty deeds, we might all be better off. It’s not so much that you should worry about an attack, but prepare for one. What price to you personally put on the personal information of customers and clients that you have slaved for over the years? How detrimental to your business would it be if this information was robbed from you?
Sending it off
Picture the average day of the marketing and or sales team. They collect lots of information about customers and consumers. Spending habits, consumer trends, saved credit card numbers, accounts, profiles, email addresses, phone numbers etc. Where do they store this? Probably in a cloud server where they can easily pluck it out if they need to use it. This is fine as long as you’re sending off information to an encryption service first. This service can be used as a go-between. The service is given the information to encrypt and then it is scrambled and saved in a folder. Only when you need that information, do you then resend that encryption back to the service, who then puts it back to its original form. This means that any searching malware just sees random data, with no correlation to what it is searching to steal. The average cost for this kind of service will be no more than the web hosting bill you receive.
A caused dropping out
Clients will give you delicate information when you’re working together on a project. Parts of their business plan will be sent to you so you can work out what is the best way to move forward with a task. It could be that you’re providing a marketing service to their soon-to-be-released product. If this information is leaked, the media will report on what is going on and all surprise is lost. The marketing team’s efforts will be shot to pieces and the client will be furious that their hard work has been leaked. A cheap vps gives you a private server to store the most sensitive information on. It’s a dedicated service and usually has a small to average size storage capability. Hence, you should be using this service for top secret information only. The price for this kind of service is easily in the $10 dollars a month range and lower. The premium options will be higher but you have much more storage capacity and features.
What would happen to your business if customers could no longer trust you? Your reputation would be blown to smithereens, and you would probably have to close down. So, ask yourself are your paying what you should for your business to be protected from criminal activity?
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Contributed content
Founder Dinis Guarda
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