Think about how we protect the things we value. We lock the doors and windows to our home. We place our valuables in safes or at a bank. We make copies of important documents. Essentially, we employ multiple forms of protection to keep our valuables safe and provide peace of mind.

The same is true of your small business. It requires multiple forms of protection to maintain customer trust and business credibility. After all, your business is an attractive target for today’s savvy hackers—small businesses are three times more likely to be targeted compared to larger companies! To succeed in today’s marketplace, your customers, partners, and employees must have trust in your ability to protect sensitive information, maintain client confidentiality, and remain operational—even when disaster strikes.

Taken collectively, the multiple defense and protection measures you employ form the basis of your network security. Network security includes firewalls, network monitoring, data backup and recovery, and secure WiFi. But network security also includes employee training on cybersecurity best practices. 

In this post, we present the network security essentials to help you build a foundation of success—and security—for your small business. Just as we protect our homes and personal valuables, we hope that you’ll implement some or all of these measures to protect your business from the threat of sophisticated and relentless cyberattacks.

What is small business network security?

Small businesses like yours are the backbone of our economy. Yet you remain an attractive target for cybercriminals because you have less time and fewer resources to devote to cybersecurity or perhaps you lack the expertise needed to implement a robust strategy. Enter network security. A secure network is critical to your success because it prevents data loss, maintains customer trust, and supports overall operational resilience. Remember, your customers, partners, and employees don’t just expect that you will protect the network—they demand it. Network security is comprised of various measures that protect your underlying technology infrastructure from unauthorized access, misuse, and theft from both nefarious actors and internal threats. Network security protects your business and your reputation. 

Lock your Front Door with a Robust Firewall

A firewall is a critical and early line of defense for your small business. To return to our analogy of home protection, a robust firewall for your business is like a strong lock on your front door. At home, we see who is coming and going; we choose to keep our front door locked or we open it up to welcome someone into our home. Similarly, a firewall allows your business to monitor the traffic that is coming into your network. It stops suspicious traffic from entering your system and grants access only to trusted addresses and data. 

A firewall is a key component of proactive network security, meaning that you have defenses in place to minimize an attack or prevent it altogether. Conversely, a reactive approach to network security means you might not have the protections in place when an attack occurs; instead, you could find yourself scrambling to recover from an intrusion after-the-fact and you’re likely to suffer greater repercussions as a result. (For more, see this previous post on How to Move from Reactive to Proactive Cybersecurity.)

Employee Training on Cybersecurity Best Practices

If a firewall is an early line of defense, your employees might be your first line of defense. At your small business, every employee has a role to play in maintaining your cybersecurity. With the right training, your staff can help you thwart potential intrusions, like a phishing campaign. At a minimum, your training plan should include the following topics:

• How to spot and avoid clicking on phishing attempts in emails and on the internet

• How to set and maintain strong passwords

• How to work safely when away from your business or office

Your team should know what to do—and who to contact—should they recognize suspicious activity. Your cybersecurity training should be holistic and impactful, and, of course, enjoyable! (For more, see this previous post on Five Cybersecurity Training Tips Your Employees Should Know.)

Secure Wi-Fi Practices

These days, we’ve grown accustomed to being able to access WiFi everywhere we go. But did you know that your WiFi is often the weakest link in defending your business against attack? Hackers can easily compromise public networks to infiltrate your business network. This is especially important given the number of people who work remotely and connect to critical business applications from home offices and shared, public locations. 

Make sure your business WiFi is password protected—and use strong passwords. Restrict access, install a firewall, and maintain antivirus software. If your business offers guest WiFi, connect it to a different network than your business uses. The Federal Communications Commission recommends that you make sure your business WiFi network is secure, encrypted, and hidden. Set up your wireless access point or router to avoid publicizing the network name (the Service Set Identifier or SSID), and then set strong password protection on the router itself.   

Data Backups as a Safety Net

What would happen if your small business was hit with a ransomware attack tomorrow? How would you operate if you lost access to your servers and information? The best defense is a robust data backup and recovery strategy to maintain uptime and ensure business continuity. Whether you’re implementing or revising your data backup strategy, consider the following strategies.

• Conduct an inventory of your various cloud application vendors and make sure you’re properly backing up all your cloud data. (Many vendors don’t offer a robust backup function as part of their service.)

• In addition, take stock of all your applications to identify which ones may lack a proper backup strategy. (For example, Microsoft Office is often assumed to come complete with robust data backup solution—it does not.)

• Back up your backed-up data! Implement a process of immutable backups, which means that once your backup data is written, it can never be changed, overwritten, or deleted. With immutable backups, your data can’t be read, modified, or deleted by clients on your network. 

Network Monitoring and Intrusion Prevention

By design, cyberattacks morph and grow every day to evade security perimeters and catch unprepared businesses off guard. Network monitoring keeps tabs on your activity, applies patches, troubleshoots, and maintains endpoints for around-the-clock peace of mind. The goal is to spot a problem and fix it before you even realize there’s an issue. It's also critical to have an intrusion prevention system in place to monitor your network for suspicious activity. The key word here is prevention. An intrusion detection system only detects suspicious activity. An intrusion prevention system both detects and denies suspicious activity to prevent hackers from exploiting your vulnerabilities.   

To return to our analogy, you must protect your business like you protect your home: proactively and completely. Just as you lock your doors and windows and only welcome trusted visitors, you must build a strong foundation of network security for your business to prevent data loss, maintain customer trust, and support overall operational resilience.

Strong network security doesn’t have to be cost-prohibitive. As a small business, you can implement cost-effective solutions that, when combined, will protect your business and boost your productivity. We can help. Often, the best first step is to schedule a free Network Security Assessment and Audit. 

Please reach out to N8 Solutions today to get started.