Small Business Tips - Increase Revenue Through Technology

I hope everyone had a wonderful Holiday Season!

Network breaches are something that can destroy a business and it's clientele all because you don't have a strong password. The American Express Open Forum reminds us of ways you can protect your business and clients.

A network data breach is a very expensive problem for a small-business owner to manage. When data is lost or compromised, you have to react quickly and notify customers about the breach. To handle the fallout that follows, you may add more legal experts and customer service specialists to your team, while hiring additional IT experts to ensure it doesn’t happen again. All that fallout-control adds up, and that doesn’t even take into account the cost of having your company’s reputation damaged by a network breach.

Here are five ways to protect your business and your bottom line from cyber-security challenges in the year ahead.

1. User Safety

“Users are always the weakest link in any security program,” says Andrew Storms, director of security operations for nCircle, an information risk and security performance management firm based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

“Small businesses can use free security policy templates that describe the best practices for both internal and remote users, to get started training their employees,” Storms says.

Michael Gregg, CEO of Superior Solutions, a Texas-based firm that provides network security services and cyber-security training, agrees that employee training is a key to protecting a small business from a network breach.

“Provide good training to your employees,” Gregg says. “So many of today’s attacks have a social component such as phishing, SMIshing and malicious websites.”

Gregg says it’s also important that employees only have access to what they need and not have additional administrative powers. 

This checklist can help you secure your network and critical company data

Every small business needs to protect its network and data from viruses, malware, and other malicious threats. A breach could cost your company not only lost revenue and the expense of recovering damaged systems but also your reputation in the marketplace. “Reputation is lost overnight. It takes a lifetime to get it back,” says Danny Pang, who runs a cyber café, Geek Terminal, in Singapore.

If you don’t currently have any safeguards in place or you’re not sure what they are, where do you start in bolstering your network and data security? Here are six steps you can take to fortify your defenses.

1. Inventory your network.

Due to increasing demands on your current technology, it's time to make sure you're not straining your network, but instead minimizing the amount of downtime that occurs. This article came from Cisco's Small Business Blog.

The right service plan can maximize network uptime and minimize lost revenues

New products and technologies, increasing mobility among employees, the need for round-the-clock access to company data and resources—these are just some of the factors driving small businesses’s growing dependence on their networks. This makes network downtime costly for any small business. According to Infonetics Research, unplanned network downtime costs companies an average of 3.6 percent revenue per year. And that doesn’t include the incalculable cost of damage to your business’s reputation caused by the downtime.

To minimize network downtime and ensure your network is available for employees to connect, collaborate, and communicate with customers and partners as well as each other, you may want to consider a support contract. A service plan will not only help protect your company’s technology investment, but it can also help save lost revenue and customers.

5 helpful steps for responding to and recovering from a network attack

Strange pop-up windows, unauthorized software, sluggish systems, mysteriously changed passwords, programs running automatically, or unofficial content posted to your website are all signs that your small business network has been hacked. If you suspect that your network security has been compromised, don’t panic! It’s important to remain calm, retain your professional demeanor, and act decisively.

In addition to seeking guidance from a security professional, these five steps can help you quickly respond and safely recover from a network attack.

1. Verify the attack on your network.

1. Wireless Signal Obstacles

Because of the natural disaster in Japan, we are reporting to those who have been affected by this devastating circumstance. Please let all those who need to get in contact with loved ones that these networks are offering free services to stay in touch. This report was gathered from Mashable.com.

Personal hot spots from your cell phone could be revolutionary for your mobile office. Verizon has had it for a few months on its Android platform and now AT&T is adding it to their services coming March 11, 2011 just in time for the iPad 2. The mobile hotspot is an application that provides access to up to five Wi-Fi enabled devices, including netbooks, laptops, MP3 players, PDAs, portable gaming systems and more.

Smaller companies can instantly start using cloud computing without having to manage the infrastructure required to run your network. The hardware and software required to host your network in-house needs to be maintained and updated constantly. Not only is the hardware very expensive, but hiring IT professionals to be administrators of the infrastructure can cost a fortune. In addition, moving over to cloud computing reduces the amount of energy used, as well as reduces carbon dioxide emissions. Aside from the cost savings, a huge incentive to move onto cloud computing is the idea of mobility and higher performance from your computers. Employees can now access information at anytime, from anywhere. This allows employees to work remotely while on business trips, vacations, or from home. Because everything is hosted on another server, your computer will be free of many of the programs that typically use up all your memory, increasing the speed and performance. Without a doubt, this technology seems to be where the future is heading, but with that in mind, there are a few things that you need to consider.