As your company grows and becomes more successful, it is crucial that your small business IT environment grows with you. Malicious actors don’t make things personal, and they will target an up-and-coming business just as quickly as an enterprise company. To keep your business growing into the future, you will need to thoroughly protect your data and avoid becoming an easy target for hackers. However, this doesn’t mean that building a secure, well connected small business IT environment is an easy task, so here are three ways to begin building a secure, responsive network.
Bringing Your IT Tools Together
We understand that a small business owner is constantly learning and pulling in the tools they need to get the job done, and this means you might have gathered some IT tools and digital assets for different purposes. The first step to building your strong small business IT environment is to bring these tools together and create an infrastructure that bridges services used to get work done, store data, and the tools staff use to stay connected. A well-connected environment that uses, for example, a cloud platform for its connectivity will make managing your network more cost effective and allow for it to scale up much easier as your small business continues to grow into the future.
Digital Tools in Your Small Business IT Environment
Once you’ve brought your small business IT environment’s technology together, you will then want to implement tools and services that improve network insight and allow your users to be more efficient in their work and client interactions. Your current and future IT staff will need to support an increasing number of endpoints and allocate the resources necessary to support new applications and technologies for your staff. Since every business will have different needs, you will need to think about and bring together the tools that best help your employees work with clients and meet compliance with government data regulations and data-sovereignty standards.
Securing Your Small Business Data
The most important step of all is to implement security tools that keep your network data safe from malicious actors. As a small business grows, a single cyberattack could cause the doors to close for good if the wrong data gets stolen or if your services get taken down for too long. This means you need layered security tools such as a robust endpoint protection service and adequate training to keep your staff vigilant to threats.
Data back ups and security features that allow you to enforce application policies will go a long way in helping your business recover from and defend against any potential attacks. Your small business IT environment will need a layered security approach that saves you time in responding to threats and makes you an unappealing target to malicious actors.
Summary
As your small business increases its operations and becomes more successful, learning how to keep your digital tools well connected yet safe can become a difficult task for any business owner. Creating an IT environment requires skills that may not be necessary for your day-to-day operations, and that’s why our team here at Robinett Consulting wants to help you and your business. We understand that every small business faces its own unique challenges, but IT shouldn’t be one of them, so when you’re ready to consolidate your digital tools and build your IT infrastructure, we want to be there to help.
