With a lot of security breaches happening nowadays and tons of personal records lost to cyber-attacks, companies have become more alert at protecting their data. The menace of phishing, third-party apps, whaling, cyber threats, and malware affect the way you do business, financial transactions, and even communicate with one another. While becoming an online business owner is simple, keeping your website and customers safe from cyber-attacks and third-party applications is not so. For small business owners, the risk is even higher as most of them don’t even have a choice of security provisions or a team and resources to keep a check on their site. Here are a couple of ways you can ensure safety for your online brand and consumers.

• Smart scanning for any threats

Online threats that scare most brands include vandalizing their websites as well as their social handles, which may lead to loopholes, viruses, vulnerabilities, and blacklisting that gives attackers access to sensitive information and malware that they can use to get themselves into your website and steal your confidential data. Companies need to opt for solutions that can provide automated applications to scan and look for any flaws in coding and app vulnerabilities.

• Protect your mobile apps

This goes without saying but besides banner design and offline marketing, more and more consumers are now using smartphone applications for online transactions. These mobile applications come with a lot of security threats like malware, loopholes, unsafe apps, hidden coding, and complex vulnerabilities. This can get even worse with constant updates and can only be dealt with using certain mobile application testing for malware, log analysis, and assessment.

• Enhance protection with data encryption

Data encryption is important since it enhances the defense mechanism and protects your website from sensitive information. Encryption also reduces the risk of hackers being able to log into passwords. By getting this installed on your website you can also protect the customers’ credit card information and personal information from being leaked out to third-party applications – ensuring that your site is safe.

• Limiting access to sensitive information

In most companies, only the IT team or the head managers are given access to certain sites and important information. Limiting the access to sensitive information to employees in the organization will help reduce the threat of this information being leaked or hackers being able to access their systems. Information should only be shared with employees who are accessing and working with the information day in and day out and the other employees who don’t need to use it should not be given access. An eCommerce development company should take these steps to ensure their data is secure. 

The Takeaway

With every passing year, the number of security breaches and threats has increased and the need for incorporating measures like SSL certificates, two-factor authentication, and access control among others has become the need of the hour. Companies are now putting in extra measures to ensure that their websites are safe as an unsecured website will push customers away, reduce conversions and lower your Google search engine rankings – not only this but customers who realize your website is unsafe will never come back again. There are a lot of options out there you can explore and implement to ensure that your site remains secure. There is also an option of hiring an experienced IT company who will check your servers for any issues, install security applications, and make sure that your site and important data are untouched. Having a team that is skilled, and experienced can help a lot when it comes to security protocols.

Clare Louise