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Advanced Technologies to Safeguard Your Business

Business threats are not just limited to competitors eroding your market share. In the digital age, a new league of risks has emerged for you to worry about, from data theft to cyberattacks. But to counter them, you now have a range of advanced technological tools at your disposal. In this article, we explore the essential ones to protect your business.

The Many Facets of Business Threats

Whether you are running a startup or a fast-expanding company, there are several widespread risks to be mindful of.

Phishing

Studies suggest that 83% of businesses encounter phishing every year. It involves deceptive schemes, often using impersonation techniques aimed at misleading employees into sharing sensitive company data.

Malware

Malicious software can threaten your business when you least expect it. From Trojan horse to spyware, different varieties of malware could infect your devices and files. Ransomware attacks are also prevalent, with the majority of them affecting small to medium-scale organizations.

Hacking

This is another malicious threat that could hold your business to ransom, jeopardize your organization’s competitiveness, or tarnish the company’s reputation.

Insider theft

Business threats can also stem from internal parties. For example, your employees could steal confidential data and pass it to competitors or sell it on the dark web. Asset misappropriation, payroll fraud, and physical asset theft are other internally driven risks you may encounter.

Identity theft

By impersonating your business, scammers could sell fake products or offer bogus discounted deals, defrauding customers, suppliers, and other important stakeholders.

Financial fraud

Deceptive suppliers, customers, and other parties can all target your organization for financial fraud. Typical schemes can range from fake check scams to fraudulent invoices.

Data and financial losses due to these common business threats can significantly impact your enterprise, with damaging repercussions that last for years. For instance, a data breach can result in serious downtime, operational disruptions, loss of business, and a tedious data recovery process.

Your stakeholders may also worry about the safety of their personal data in your possession. This will result in a loss of credibility and a tarnished reputation, recovering from which could take significant effort and time.

Advanced Technologies to Safeguard Your Business

Technology-based options to strengthen business security have made significant strides over the decades. Let’s take a look at the essential solutions every enterprise should adopt.

Access controls

This is one of the simplest methods to keep your business assets safe, whether they include physical goods or digital data. In the old days, guarding them typically meant keeping assets under lock and key. But today, you can find far more advanced solutions enabled by evolving technology.

Access cards, fingerprints, and iris scans allow you to control and monitor access permissions granted to employees. With IoT-based solutions, you can integrate all these into a single platform and even track them on your laptop, mobile phone, and other handheld devices from a remote location.

Data protection solutions

As a business, protecting critical data—from your marketing plans, business strategies, and contracts to patents, formulas, and proprietary designs—is a top priority.

You may also have confidential details about your customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders. Federal and state laws require you to assure their safety, too.

Now, there are a variety of tech tools to strengthen data security. For instance, two-factor authentication allows you to have an additional layer of protection besides the traditional password. With multi-factor authentication techniques, you can amp this up further using several verification steps.

Biometrics are also widely used to safeguard data. This involves using unique biological identifiers, including fingerprint, voice, facial, and retina recognition and similar methods, to identify individuals and prevent unauthorized access.

Secure gateways, encryption, firewalls, and virus guards are some of the other essential technological defenses to adopt.

Data analytics

Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and related technologies enable businesses to crunch large volumes of data at incredible speed.

This has multiple advantages when used in different settings. For example, AI-enabled data analytics solutions can make life easier for your security teams when detecting possible fraud and cyber risks. They will help you identify known and unknown trends and anomalies by monitoring data in real time so you can respond faster to potential threats.

Advanced verifications

There are times when you will need to verify information provided by a supplier before signing a contract or confirm a customer’s identity before giving them access to sensitive data.

Several advanced tools can help you authenticate business-critical data and minimize enterprise risks. PhoneHistory, for instance, allows you to find more information about individuals and businesses based on a simple phone number search. It is able to quickly process countless records belonging to over 500 million US contact numbers while eliminating human errors often encountered with manual data collection and processing.

Cloud storage

There are inherent risks to storing confidential data on local hardware. They are more prone to theft, loss, and physical damage. Devices such as computers and laptops are also vulnerable to hacking and malware attacks.

Advanced cloud storage options offer a more secure solution for storing business information off-site. They deploy encryption, firewalls, security updates, two-factor authentication, and similar measures to protect information, offering more robust protection than traditional storage mediums.

Cloud services are cost-effective, too, and allow remote access to stored files. They are also a convenient backup option to recover files in the event you experience data loss. This helps eliminate costly downtime and, more importantly, the risk of losing access to crucial files permanently.

To Wrap Up

You likely already leverage advanced technologies to save time, improve efficiency, reduce cost, boost productivity, and streamline processes in your business. But they can be just as effective when it comes to ensuring your enterprise’s safety and security.

New and innovative technological tools used in access controls, data protection, data analytics, advanced verifications, and cloud storage are pivotal for identifying and avoiding potential threats, minimizing their impact, and mitigating business risks. Training your employees and setting up security protocols, policies, and frameworks is also essential in these efforts.