Technology for MSMEs: The outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the economy and businesses across the globe. Among the worst affected in these trying times are the small business and start-ups, as they stare at major financial resource crunch. It’s a double whammy for small enterprises and startups, with the rising threat of cyber frauds and data breaches. Cybercriminals are increasingly becoming effective as their techniques are evolving at a fast pace, and this makes businesses always at risk of a cyber-attack. The large corporations, critical government infrastructures, and others have built strong resilience to cyber threats, but small business and start-ups need to cover-up and remain extra vigilant with a robust strategy to mitigate risks.
As businesses are increasingly storing confidential information and data in cloud services, the necessity for more complex security practices and strategies has become even larger. The small businesses and startups often lack the necessary resources and security policies to defend against cyber frauds, thus making them easy targets for hackers. The primary concerns for businesses are the security of customer information and intellectual property data. In the face of these threats, the organization should adopt and implement strict IT security policies to minimize system weakness.
Remote Working
As the world is making various scenarios of lockdown exit, there’s a high possibility of remote working to stay for some time, before things get normal. Hence, it’s critical that small businesses and startups embrace this new normal, and draw their strategies against cyber frauds and data breaches.
- It’s advisable that small businesses or enterprises provide laptops or devices to employees to work from home. This will ascertain certain standards of security controls such as anti-virus, security patches, disabling unwanted services/ applications etc. Organisations should make it mandatory that machines used for company’s business must have malware, spyware, and firewall software installed, to catch and eliminate threats before they become problematic.
- Only secured virtual private network (VPN) connectivity be allowed for remote access. In addition, only whitelisted IP addresses or device ids be allowed to access systems, this will restrict access to only authorised users.
- One has to ensure that any device such as laptop, tablets, mobile, etc. which are being used to work remotely should be on a platform, that can be remotely traced and deactivate, in an event of loss/ theft or any other misuse. It’s advisable to create logs of every activity performed, so that same can be retrieved at a later stage if needed.
Remote Working
As the world is making various scenarios of lockdown exit, there’s a high possibility of remote working to stay for some time, before things get normal. Hence, it’s critical that small businesses and startups embrace this new normal, and draw their strategies against cyber frauds and data breaches.
- It’s advisable that small businesses or enterprises provide laptops or devices to employees to work from home. This will ascertain certain standards of security controls such as anti-virus, security patches, disabling unwanted services/ applications etc. Organisations should make it mandatory that machines used for company’s business must have malware, spyware, and firewall software installed, to catch and eliminate threats before they become problematic.
- Only secured virtual private network (VPN) connectivity be allowed for remote access. In addition, only whitelisted IP addresses or device ids be allowed to access systems, this will restrict access to only authorised users.
- One has to ensure that any device such as laptop, tablets, mobile, etc. which are being used to work remotely should be on a platform, that can be remotely traced and deactivate, in an event of loss/ theft or any other misuse. It’s advisable to create logs of every activity performed, so that same can be retrieved at a later stage if needed.
