Nobody ever thinks twice about securing their home or their business. They are tangible assets that contain your possessions, your loved ones or your employees. It’s only natural that we should want to secure them with locks and bars and fences and alarms. But we don’t always act as smartly with our less tangible assets, like our electronic or digital ones. These too are very important and they often contain a lot of important information, have been created at a great expense and in many instances, they speak loudly towards your credibility as a business. In short you should be protecting your digital assets as smartly as you look after your more traditional ones. Here are a few tips on what you can do to secure things.
Web Security
Your website needs to be a secure place where it is safe for your contacts and potential clients to leave their details without fear of compromise. It should also be a place that is safe from hacking or sabotage by rivals or pranksters. You can buy SSL certificate cheap if you know where to look and obviously if you know what it is. In short is a tiny encrypted file that is installed on your server and which facilitates secure connections between the server and individual browsers. Simple and easy to obtain and done right, it will avoid a potential lifetime of pain.
Back-ups
Make sure that all your important files and documents are backed up in multiple places. Unlike old-school assets like jewellery or television sets and such like, digital items can be replicated easily. Be it audio files, documents, images or videos, make sure you keep copies in multiple places. One of the best ideas is to mail yourself copies of important files using Gmail. That way you will have a copy of every file sent or received, easy to search for and stored forever.
Passwords
In the same way that you probably don’t use the same key for your front door as your back door, you shouldn’t use the same password for everything that you access online. There are a lot of nefarious types in cyberspace always looking to hack and violate private accounts. If they are able to hack one of your accounts and start looking to create mischief, it is so much easier if they can use the same hacked password that worked the first time when they move on to all your other accounts. It might be easier to remember just a single password, but it is also a whole lot easier for the bad types who are lurking out there.
Privacy in Public Places
If you are going to be transferring important data over a public internet connection it might be prudent to look into setting up a VPN or Virtual Private Network. A VPN allow people to connect to a private network and to pass information in a secure fashion even though it is done via an open public network. In many ways it is similar to a firewall, except instead of being installed on your computer or router, it is a layer of security that happens online.
