Getting Started with Small Business Protection

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Safety is paramount to the success of your business, which is why larger companies dedicate entire departments to protective measures. Small business owners don’t always have that luxury, leaving them to handle unique risks without a massive amount of protective resources. That creates a real challenge, one that can often lead to digital, physical, and even legal issues most are unprepared to handle.

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So, what can you do? Before leaving your failsafes and security protocols to the wind, check out these tips to help make protection a top priority at your small business. From simple office rules to management tools, here’s the ultimate safety strategy.

Get Rid of Personal Devices

Step one to your plan of action should be eliminating personal or bring-your-own devices in the workplace. This reduces the risk of weak links in your security plan, helping to keep the lid tight on your operations.

While this isn’t always possible, there are workarounds to achieve the same result. Instead of removing these devices from your place of business, adopt a universal security package for your employees. The usefulness of managing and auditing your entire IT infrastructure’s user access rights with a tool like SolarWinds can’t be understated.

Malware Matters

As tight as security may be on your employee end, the world of the web is a malicious place. Malware protection is a vital safeguard for your business, manning the front lines while data enters and leaves your servers. It’s still important to train employees on security and safety measures, but this set-it-and-forget-it protection is something you can’t do without.

Unique Passwords

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While this 90’s rhetoric shouldn’t need restated in 2018, the number of hacks from even seemingly airtight corporations in the past few years suggests that it hasn’t set in just yet. With a single data breach costing upwards of $1 million on average, this is one area of security you literally can’t afford to overlook.

Ensuring every member of your staff uses a strong password is crucial these days. Have them keep the word used unique, add numbers, and make sure they utilize symbols if possible for the best results. Also, it helps to have your employees change their password every six months to a year.

Physical Security

It isn’t something most business owners want to think about, but individuals within your operation can be just as dangerous as those on the outside. While it is important to trust your employees, it never hurts to utilize cameras and locks when possible. Plus, these tools are an excellent means of theft prevention.

Backup Your Data

From contracts to daily sales, today’s businesses record almost everything online. Technical malfunctions happen at the most inconvenient times, which is why backing up your data is essential. Instead of opting for pricey equipment, consider cloud storage as a frugal yet secure alternative. There are numerous cloud storage services available that can help you create “hard” copies of important information.

Insurance

Even if you’re in the earliest stages of operation, business insurance can save you an enormous headache. Depending on what your business entails, you may need varying types of insurance. Public liability, home business, and indemnity are a few popular examples. Regardless of which kind your business needs, protecting yourself in the event of a worst-case scenario is vital.
Other small business insurance needs include:

  • General liability
  • Professional liability
  • Errors and omissions
  • Owners policy
  • Workers compensation
  • Property
  • Home-based
  • Product liability
  • Vehicle
  • And business interruption

Physical Protection

No, not bodyguards. Physical protection and security come in a wide variety of forms. Each of which is equally as important as the digital ones you’ve set in place. A simple example would be ensuring that your brand is unique to avoid any litigation or legal ramifications.

Another example would be the use of physical documents for contracts and agreements. Aside from creating a professional look, it further protects agreements made between you, your employees, and your clients with a hard copy. Adding arbitration clauses to those contracts is another physical security measure that can prevent legal ramifications down the road.

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Finally, physical protection for a small business can be as simple as creating a safe work environment. Working to prevent accidents and encouraging non-discrimination as well as non-harassment policies might not be the first thing on your mind when the word protection comes to mind, but they are just as important as cyber security measures.

Protecting Your Business

Security isn’t something to take lightly in any business venture, but you don’t have to shell out your earnings on an entire department just to make sure your organization is protected. By following the tips and advice above, you can keep every aspect of your small business from digital to physical secure while keeping things affordable.

Protecting Your Most Valuable Assets

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As a property owner, you would like to be able to predict every scenario that could happen to your home, business, vehicles, and other assets. However, accidents and disasters happen when you least expect them. You have to be prepared at all times to respond to the worst.

Along with repairing and maintaining your home, car, and other property, you also may want to cover them with policies that will pay out if or when an accident or disaster occurs. By investing in home, business, and auto insurance palm coast fl, property owners like you can always be protected against devastating financial losses.

Getting a Free Quote

Before you invest in a new policy for any asset, you want to know how much it will cost you. You do not want to spend a lot of money each term on premiums that are outside of your budget. You would ideally like the premiums to be realistic for what you can afford and what you know you can budget for ahead of time.

When visiting an insurance broker’s website, you should be able to ask for and receive a free quote for any kind of insurance policy the company sells. The premium quote will be based on different factors like your age, state of residence, gender, and driving history. It will also take into account whether or not you are a first-time insurance buyer or someone who has had insurance in the past.

Once you get a free quote for the policy, you can decide if you want to buy the policy or continue shopping around for better rates. Note that the rates presented on the broker’s website are likely designed to be for the least expensive policy. You may find the bargain you want or need to continue your search.

Insuring your car and other property is important as the owner. You want to know you will recoup your losses after a disaster or accident. You do not have to guess what your premiums might be before you purchase the insurance. You can get a free quote and more information by using insurance brokers’ websites today.

3 Things All Business Owners Need to Know About Risk-Taking

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As pivotal as it is to be systematic and strategic with everything that you do in business, you also have to be open to a spot of risk-taking from time to time. To ready yourself for when that time comes for you, you need to know a few very important things.

Here’s are three things that you, as a business owner, need to know about the taking of risks:

1. It’s okay to predict disaster as it’s only natural

A business owner you might be, but you’re still a human being. As a human, you are naturally and inherently biased towards the predicting of disaster. For this reason, every time you seek to take a risk, there will probably be a voice in your head telling you not to take it because everything is bound to go wrong.

First of all, you have to accept that this is your inherent bias and that you’re always going to be fearful — it’s okay to be like this, it’s just who you are. Second of all, you have to do all you can not to let your fears guide you or push you towards making decisions. Of course, if the bad does, quite clearly, outweigh the good in regards to the risks you seek to take (after you’ve taken some time to look at them subjectively), then, yes, steer clear of them. Never, however, let your natural desire to predict everything going wrong guide your risk-taking actions.

2. When it comes to taking a risk, align yourself alongside experts

There’s nothing wrong with asking for help at any point in your career, as two or more heads are always better than one. This sentiment rings especially loud and true when it comes to risk-taking, though.

Simply, whenever you enter into a field you’re not wholly sure about, before you take any kind of risk within it, you should seek to align yourself with an industry expert. By doing so, you will be able to tap into their expert knowledge and use it provide you with a better understanding of where, when, what, and how to take your risk. An example of this is you getting in touch with a high leverage broker before you seek to invest in the foreign exchange (Forex) market — by doing so, you’d learn about what it takes to trade in high volumes as well as how to perform investment risk calculations.

3. The ability to take a risk will help you to stand out

As not a lot of people in business are willing to take a risk, by doing so yourself, you will make yourself stand out. For better or worse, your ability to put caution to the wind will act as a differentiator between you and your competitors. For customers that like that kind of thing, that’ll put you at the forefront of their mind. Subsequently, this will bye you a one-way ticket to the front of your market.

If you feel like your business is stuck in a bit of a rut, why not try something new? More to the point, why not take a bit of a risk?

How Disaster Recovery Can Benefit Your Business

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If you are a business, having a good disaster recovery solution in place is absolutely vital, especially given the technological world that we now live in and the advancements that have been made in the past decade. If you have not yet invested in disaster recovery for your business, then this is the article for you as we will be taking you through exactly what this is and also how it can benefit your business. Carry on reading if you want to know a little bit more about this.

What Is Disaster Recovery?

Disaster recovery is a solution that has now become a necessity for businesses as it will protect data and business information systems from any kind of possible disaster. This can be anything including human errors, natural events, hacking and even theft. As you can see, it is extremely important for businesses to have this in place in our new, modern world as these are all potential ways that you could lose a lot of sensitive and important information.

The Benefits of Disaster Recovery for Your Business

Now that you know exactly what disaster recovery is, it is time to delve into the amazing benefits that it will bring to your company.

1. Restore Time Reductions and Lower RTO & RPO

What business love about having a disaster recovery system in place is that you have the warranty of restore systems, services and applications in far shorter times and you can also enjoy a far lower RTO and RPO. Reducing your restore times drastically is pretty much impossible without using disaster recovery services and so this is a massive benefit of having this in place.

2. Limit Revenue Reduction Costs

When you reduce the restore times of business information systems you will be able to limit your losses of revenue. What’s more, you will also be able to limit losses for other costs that have been caused by downtime and management or technical assistance expenditure.

3. Safeguard Business Operations

Every business will have critical processes in place that always need to be active as they are vital to the smooth running of the business. One of the amazing benefits of using a disaster recovery solution is that these processes will be preserved and any interruptions will be kept to a minimum, so you can get your business operations back up and running in no time.

4. Protect Your Company Reputation

As we previously mentioned, when critical processes to your business are not active, this can cause your business to not run as smoothly as you would like. If this happens, this will normally result in lots of very unhappy customers! So, if you want to protect your company’s reputation and make sure that your customers are happy with the service that you are providing, you will need to make sure that you have effective disaster recovery in place.

5. Have a Plan for Unexpected Situations

No business expects to have a situation arise where they need disaster recovery, but this is exactly the point! Every business should have the peace of mind that there is a process in place should they face an unexpected situation. A disaster recovery programme will ensure that your business has a detailed plan in place to intervene in the case of an emergency. This usually involved a short restoration which is controlled in all its stages.

6. Customise Your Own Disaster Recovery

Finally, one of the best benefits of having disaster recovery solutions in place is that you can customise it so that it fits your business perfectly and works exactly how you want it to. You will be able to customise and monitor your own disaster recovery solution and this allows you to pick the replication frequency and establish what the best recovery times are for your business. Furthermore, having this personalisation also means that you can constantly control your disaster recovery site.

As you can see, there are a range of fantastic benefits that come along with having a disaster recovery solution in place. Not only that, nowadays with the latest advancements in technology it is vital for most businesses to have this in place.

Have You Insured Your Business Correctly?

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StrategyDriven Risk Management ArticleInsurance: if you don’t have it, you’ll only wish you did if the time comes to call upon it. Indeed, it’s far safer, smarter (and sometimes more financially viable) to invest in insurance, just in case.

This protection becomes even more important when you’re running a business — you’ve certainly got a lot on the line if you fail to insure your business properly. You could lose profit, employees or reputation. Business insurance can seem confusing and over-complicated. Truthfully, it can be quite simple to ascertain whether you’re insuring your business correctly, by deciding which of the various types of business insurance you need…

Asset insurance

Commonly we think of ‘assets’ more with personal insurance, yet there are many assets that your business will rely upon, and which you’ll, therefore, want to insurance. Think specifically of any equipment — manufacturing and the like — that you depend upon for income; should any of these be at fault or be stolen, you’d be unable to continue working. Insurance can be used to defend against any unforeseen interruptions to workflow.

Travel insurance

You may not have considered whether you need professional travel insurance, as once again it’s something that’s more commonly associated with personal cover. Yet, if you or any of your employees travel for work (whether internationally or domestically) you’ll want a level of protection in place. Even if simply to cover goods such as business phones and laptops when you are out of the office. Most certainly if any of your team are flying abroad, carrying with them anything that belongs to the company, either in hand or hold luggage, you’ll want this to be insured.

Motor insurance

Do you or your employees drive, using company cars or pool cars? If so, you should also have motor insurance. This is also the case even if your employees are using the company cars for personal use — you must take out a business policy, as you’re the vehicle owner on paper. If you’re unsure of the technicalities involved in carpooling with company-owned vehicles, ask a Business Insurance expert for advice on their commercial vehicle insurance.

Personal indemnity

Many professions, ranging from doctors to journalists, would benefit from taking out personal indemnity insurance in their line of work. This policy covers the financial repercussions of a client making a loss due to incorrect information or guidance from the company itself. You may think, “Well that’ll never happen to us.” However, save your risk-taking for other aspects of the business — such as innovation — and get yourself covered as tightly as you can.

Credit insurance

Balancing the books can be tough, and especially so if you’re got invoices out that clients are unwilling to pay in a timely manner. Credit insurance can be put in place to ease cash flow issues so that even if you’re awaiting some big payments, you can still continue to invest in your supply chain and keep the business running day to day.

It really is recommended that you consider whether you’re insuring your business correctly; review whether you’re missing any of the above, and get in touch with a business insurance company today.