protecting your business – Growing Forward

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Protecting your business from harm’s way is important because when you’re in the public domain, you can be an open target for many things, whether that’s customers who are angry at your company’s service or hackers who are trying to steal your data. There’s plenty of dangers for a business, so here are some tips to help protect it from disaster.

Backup Your Files

Backing up your files is an important process that you should be doing already, and if you’re not, there’s a lot of risk that could come your way by not doing so. When backing up your files, you want to store this data off-site. That’s because if your building was to burn down or get ransacked by burglars, then there’s the likelihood of your data and files as a whole becoming compromised or destroyed. That’s why a lot of companies will keep their data in a cloud system, or they’ll store it off-site, perhaps with their IT support if it’s outsourced. When looking at backup and disaster recovery solutions, you want to find a company or process that will make sure you’re left with a back-dated or up to date version of your files, should anything ever go wrong with the originals. If you don’t, then it could be something that ends up killing your business if you’re not careful.

Make Sure The Premises Are Secure

The premises to your building need to be considered too because no building is really safe unless it’s got a good system in place that deters anyone from breaking in. There should be a process in place that enables all staff to lock up the building safely if needs be. Take a look at your current setup for your workplace, and if you don’t think it’s to a reasonable standard, security-wise, then it’s important to make the changes necessary to tighten that security. That could mean having a doorman on the door to stop any unwanted guests from coming into the building. It might be having a card system to make sure it stops anyone unwanted from coming into or up to the main office areas.

Shred Everything

When it comes to handling customer data, you’re responsible for making sure that data doesn’t get leaked or land in the wrong hands. Shredding is a process that helps protect your business so that if you’re throwing these files out in the general trash, it will be much harder for that information to be stolen. You should really have a service that collects confidential papers or shredding and destroys them properly.

Be Wary Of All Financial Decisions

And finally, be wary of all financial decisions that are made for the business. The finances of a company are imperative to keep healthy, otherwise that’s what usually makes a company go under. Be careful of spending and how much money comes in and out of the business.

Protecting your business from disaster can be done as long as you’re being attentive and taking the right steps to protect it.

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Most businesses, no matter how online or IT-led, will need to operate with some form of storage capacity. Offices require safety equipment, bulk orders, and even some old/replacement IT equipment itself to be stored in a safe space, somewhere you can keep your valuables. It might be a place where you house your warehouse goods, or somewhere you protect your files. No matter the reason for curating a storage space with a degree of security, it’s important you know how to protect it. After all, this will often be not the beating heart of your company, but the stomach, feeding your business with the goods it needs from bottom to top. You cannot afford to have this broken into or impeded by the elements.

Here are some tips for tightening security around this space:

Structural Integrity

It might be that this is an outhouse. It might be a full warehouse. It might also be an addendum to your office that just outside of the building. No matter what you use the storage space for, it’s likely to be of a size to not only allow for your goods, but also for staff members to index and maneuver this space. This is why it’s likely going to be an exterior space to your office, but there are exceptions.

With this, it’s important to analyze the structural integrity of that building itself. Sometimes shabby old bricks can be taken down with a targeted sledgehammer. Sometimes a roof can be broken into, warranting the use of much more secure metal roofing. Sometimes the elements might have access, dripping water on goods that need to stay dry to function. This means that continually repairing and inspecting the strength of your structural integrity becomes a maintenance task to prioritize.

Security

The strongest structural integrity in the world will mean nothing without adequate security. Invest in an alarm system, a solid means of indexing inventory, guards if necessary, and a competent alarm system. It can also be worth implementing a system in which whoever enters the space has to declare their name and the time of the entry and exit. This helps you avoid theft from within your staff, and develop a responsibility for the entire workforce to take care of this environment.

Pests

It’s not just humans you need to watch out for. Pests can often spread within warm, relatively still environments. Pests can also find an easy way into the building, without much in the way of difficulty. For this reason, hiring the services of a pest control firm to set your building up with traps, necessary poison and other deterrents can help you manage the hygiene of the space. It will also help you manage your costed goods, as there’s nothing seemingly more enjoyable to a rat than cable wire to chew through.

Protecting your stored assets does take a little time and energy, but the effort is ultimately rewarded with a lack of issue or loss in value. Be sure to keep an eye on this often, and you’ll find that you are gifted with protected belongings indefinitely.