Heads up, startups!

Four out of five com­pa­nies are not safe from an IT secu­rity breach.

Small and large com­pa­nies com­pet­ing in the dig­i­tal world con­front dif­fer­ent sets of chal­lenges. But more often than not the most impor­tant chal­lenge of all gets over­looked. We are talk­ing about IT secu­rity. Sure enough, it is not always tagged as a mile­stone but instead is often ignored or for­got­ten alto­gether. The bottom-​line ques­tion is: Should one of the four out of five com­pa­nies risk­ing an IT secu­rity breach in its early years of oper­a­tion end up being your very own busi­ness? Whether it be mali­cious attacks from hack­ers and cyber crim­i­nals or threats via cyber espi­onage – “cyber secu­rity has many faces”.

Star­tups beware

Dig­i­tal attacks are a grow­ing risk for com­pa­nies as a whole. Star­tups need to be par­tic­u­larly wary! For any young com­pany feel­ing its oats it is essen­tial to develop a height­ened aware­ness of just how vital data pro­tec­tion and cyber secu­rity are. What with all the indi­vid­ual licences and sep­a­rate pro­grammes required, it is indeed vir­tu­ally impos­si­ble to keep a company’s orig­i­nal pro­pri­etary ideas – those par­tic­u­larly worth pro­tect­ing – safe from the very out­set. The fo-​cus may well be on build­ing up the busi­ness, but slap­dash pro­tec­tion of the web domain while neglect­ing to safe­guard e-​mails, infra­struc­ture and end­points is not enough. An all-​around secu­rity sys­tem must be put in place! What indeed will hap­pen oth­er­wise – when, say, your busi­ness is run­ning smoothly, with the com­pany grow­ing strong – should come as no sur­prise. As struc­tural changes will need to be imple­mented, even then in most cases no thought will be given to IT secu­rity straight away, and this can well lead to extremely seri­ous prob­lems down the road. .

Steer­ing clear of prob­lems

To head off any pos­si­ble neg­a­tive fall­out, infor­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy has to play a key role right from the out­set. Mod­i­fied struc­tures involve com­men­su­rate growth in the IT infra­struc­ture such as from single-​user stand­alone to multi-​user net­work, for instance, or from local net­work at the office to wide area net­work­ing in order to pro­vide net­work con­nec­tiv­ity between mul­ti­ple loca­tions for numer­ous employ­ees.

If you hit an IT snag, the first best or cre­ative solu­tion deployed will not always prove to be the most effec­tive one. And anti-​virus soft­ware alone, for exam­ple, sim­ply won’t do the trick. It might do at first blush, but in the end there’s no get­ting around the pro­fes­sional solu­tion for com­plete IT secu­rity. After all, sen­si­tive com­pany and cus­tomer data risk being manip­u­lated or stolen by crim­i­nal hack­ers able to infil­trate com­pa­nies via secu­rity gaps in net­works, IT sys­tems or appli­ca­tions. It is also impor­tant to keep an eye on the per­sonal devices being used at the com­pany as they put all of the data at par­tic­u­lar risk. These devices oper­ate in mul­ti­ple net­works and have a broad array of third-​party soft­ware installed. State-​of-​the-​art secu­rity solu­tions such as the Cloud con­clu­sively demon­strate that they do more than just enhance data and infor­ma­tion secu­rity while reduc­ing invest­ment costs. Not only does the Cloud ensure that all busi­ness data are imme­di­ately pro­tected against the lat­est viruses and other web threats but also a cloud backup safe­guards against data loss. The Cloud is ide­ally suited for star­tups in par­tic­u­lar. Mov­ing to the Cloud obvi­ates the need to build your own IT infra­struc­ture in that access to IT resources are geared to your require­ments and deliv­ered on demand. For any­one start­ing up a busi­ness, Cloud secu­rity offers the advan­tage of a clear price struc­ture in addi­tion to a high level of stan­dard­i­s­a­tion and automa­tion, as well as being easy to use with­out high invest­ment costs while enjoy­ing IT secu­rity func­tions right from the get-​go. It allows com­pa­nies to focus on their core lines of busi­ness while at the same time their Cloud ser­vice provider takes care of the infor­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy.

Pro­tect­ing your busi­ness right from the early start-​up stage

Star­tups need to be mind­ful of the fact that IT secu­rity is a nec­es­sary invest­ment from the out­set – an invest­ment that is as matter-​of-​fact as get­ting a busi­ness license or pur­chas­ing hard-​ware. After all, today’s com­pa­nies can make the giant leap to suc­cess only if they have an astute aware­ness of just how impor­tant IT secu­rity is. It is not that uncom­mon for the early real­i­sa­tion of this fact alone to enhance secu­rity by upwards of 50 per­cent. This is the rea­son that your secu­rity objec­tives must align with your busi­ness goals at all times. Con­stant sys­tem­atic checks help to deter­mine:
• who has access to what data
• whether all users are imple­ment­ing safe pass­words
• how data can be trans­mit­ted only in encrypted form
• whether data on mobile devices are just as well pro­tected as they are on your com­puter
• how phys­i­cal data backup works

Most par­tic­u­larly those areas that had pre­vi­ously been inad­e­quately pro­tected against cyber attacks should be delim­ited and upgraded at the ear­li­est oppor­tu­nity. The major­ity of cyber attacks tend to occur in such areas. Prop­erly pro­tect­ing your com­pany and in par­tic­u­lar your infor­ma­tion assets is accord­ingly pos­si­ble thanks to quick response time.

Suc­cess­ful cyber secu­rity to ensure that hack­ers won’t stand a chance: our experts are happy to assist you in set­ting up an ini­tial con­sul­ta­tion, with no oblig­a­tion of course.
Con­tact us
by e-​mail at: team@​ipdnow.​de
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