Your Business May Be Most Vulnerable from the Inside

It can be easy, with all the threats covered in the news, to assume that the biggest dangers to your business all come from the outside. This is a dangerous mistake, as there are plenty of vulnerabilities that originate from within your organization, making it easier for outside threats to come in, if not being bigger threats in and of themselves. Below, we’ll review some of the biggest, mostly internal dangers that your business may face.

Internal Fraud
You may be closer to some scammers than you would have originally thought. It unfortunately isn’t that uncommon for the employees of a business to steal from it, whether its finances or invaluable data. While you will want to be able to trust your employees, as you should, you also need to be realistic and accept that you may inadvertently hire a few bad eggs. This reality means that you need to have measures in place to keep data inaccessible to anyone who doesn’t need it through access control and other solutions.

Excessive Access
On a similar note, your endpoints themselves should be secured against threats, as these devices could easily leave your business vulnerable if no security measures are put in place. Whether an employee leaves their phone on the counter when they pick up their lunch, or someone sneaks into the office and accesses an unattended workstation, your endpoints themselves need a defense of their own to protect your data.

Insecure Applications
If your business is anything like most, you rely on a variety of applications in order to keep it in operation from day-to-day. While these pieces of software are crucial to your productivity, applications developed by third parties or used by a cloud provider may not be as secure as you would prefer. You need to be selective as you settle on solutions to leverage, or you’ll risk your data being compromised.

Human Error and Mismanagement
Finally, we come to one of the biggest issues that any business has: the fact that it has people working for it. Human error and insufficient management of your IT can create some of the most serious issues and enable more to take root. Without an experienced resource to help protect your network, it is left susceptible to threats. On top of this, there is a long history of simple mistakes leading to IT catastrophes to consider as well. While some errors will ultimately be unavoidable, you should impress upon your employees how important it truly is to focus on their work and review everything they do for mistakes.

With a combination of the right solutions and some old-fashioned vigilance, you can help to keep your business safe and secure against the many threats out there. Washington Works can assist you - call 301-571-5040 to learn about what we can do for you.