Your business data is one of your company’s most valuable assets and keeping it secure must be at the top of your priorities. Small business owners often neglect protection of data, either because of the costs associated with it, or because they don’t have technical skills to employ necessary measures. Here are some simple tips that you as a business owner can follow to make sure your business data is secure and that your company is protected from financial damage that is caused by accidents or data security breaches.

First step in improving the security of your business data would be conducting a risk assessment of your online and operating systems. The most important for your business is to install antivirus programs, antispyware programs and firewall software on all computers. Firewalls are used to separate your company’s internal network form the Internet, and they examine and filter potentially harmful data that enters or leaves the network. Installing antivirus software will protect your data form malware programs such as viruses, worms, trojan horses and countless other threats. These programs and the operating system should be regularly updated.

Use strong passwords. When it comes to security, it is also important that your employees use strong passwords and change them at least once every 2 months. There are free softwares available on the web that make braking passwords very easy. When passwords are broken your business data is exposed to maluse. Strong passwords are those that consist of combination of numbers and symbols.

Educate your employees. It is critical for the success of your security plan that your employees have a basic knowledge of cyber security and to understand the security practices your company employs, including limiting some of their user privileges that are seen as a potential thereat to data security.

Don’t forget to back up important information. Making backup copies of all important data should be your regular practice. It is recommended that you do this once a week. This will ensure that critical data is not lost in the case of a hard-drive failure, attack, or natural disaster. Keep all backup copies off-site in secure location and use encryption to protect important information form hackers. Encryption programs scramble data in order to make it unreadable until the user enters a password or encryption key to unlock it. Another cost-effective way of storing off-site backups is to choose from a number of vendors offering a remote backup service.

Regularly Update Your Software. To avoid software bugs that can be exploited by hackers,
it is of great importance that your software is regularly updated. Configure your  operating system, firewall and antivirus software to receive regular updates.

Use rights management software to protect business data. Email and files that contain important business information often end up being seen by people other than those they were intended for. To prevent this from happening, think about using rights management software to protect your sensitive business data. Content rights management software is used to encrypt files, enforce access and limit usage privileges such as forwarding, editing and printing.

Keep your Website secure. If your company is selling products and services and collecting customer information on website, you should secure your site from cyber attacks. You can do this by using secure socket layer (SSL). This means that the data traffic between client computers and web server is encrypted during communication over the Internet.