Whether or not you believe in New Year’s resolutions, most business owners will agree that there are things in their company that need to be optimized.
Whether you are looking to improve productivity through more efficient use of your cloud apps or want to reduce risk through better cybersecurity, creating technology goals for the new year can be advantageous.
Take advantage of that natural start-of-the-year energy to do better this year and optimize by creating some technology resolutions that can guide you and your team to a great 2022.
Here are some of the most impactful resolutions to make that can improve efficiency and reduce your risk of a costly cyberattack.
Put Multi-Factor Authentication in Place on All Online Accounts
Cloud account compromise is now responsible for 20% of data breaches globally, making it the number one cause of breaches. With most business data and processes being online, the credentials to those online accounts have become a hot commodity among cybercriminals.
If you’ve been dragging your feet about putting in multi-factor authentication for your team because you’re worried about pushback, this is the year to overcome that.
With credential breaches on the rise, it’s vital to protect your accounts and the best way to do that is through multi-factor authentication (MFA). This method of security has a 99.9% success rate at blocking fraudulent sign-in attempts.
Test Restoration of Your Backups
In 2021, ransomware grew by 400%, and many of those attacked end up paying the ransom either because they don’t have a full backup of their data or they do but they’ve never tested it.
Even large companies like Colonial Pipeline, which suffered a breach last year that caused gas prices across the country to rise, will pay the ransom if they think it will get operations back up and running faster than a data restoration.
In 2022, make a plan to test the restoration of your data backup to ensure it’s as fast as it needs to be and so you’ll know exactly how long it will take. Testing this regularly also gets your team familiar with the process so they’ll be ready should a data loss even happen.
Conduct an Employee Cloud App Use Survey
Cloud waste is rampant, with companies paying for apps they don’t even know about, over-provisioning, and suffering from redundancies in their cloud environment.
It’s time to streamline your use of the cloud, which will help you save money and optimize your workflows.
The place to begin is an employee cloud app use survey. This will give you valuable insights into the apps that employees find helpful and the ones they don’t. You can learn which apps no one is using and what apps might be out there that you didn’t even realize were being used.
Put Device Security In Place for Remote Employees
The past two years have completely changed the way many companies operate. Remote working has now become the norm, and a lot of businesses have transitioned to a remote and hybrid (office/remote) working environment.
Charlotte and North Carolina have embraced the benefits of remote work, and the state is ranked 8th in the nation for the availability of remote jobs.
Unfortunately, security hasn’t always kept up with the move to work-from-home (WFH) teams. 2022 is the time to put permanent infrastructure in place to support your employees working remotely.
Make a New Year’s resolution to put an endpoint device management software in place that will allow you to remotely manage things like antivirus and software updates, security patches, and access management.
Get a Business Password Manager
The number of passwords people must juggle makes it near-impossible to remember so many strong passwords that are also unique to each account. This leads to accounts being less secure due to bad password security.
Employees create weak passwords or store them in non-secure ways (i.e., sticky notes or unprotected Excel files), increasing the chance for a breach.
Get a business password manager this year to alleviate password stress and improve security. You can give each employee their own user account that enables them to use a password vault that keeps track of all their passwords for them, securely. They only need to remember one to reach all the rest.
Create a Culture of Cybersecurity
One training on phishing awareness a year does not create a culture of cybersecurity. You need to keep the topic of IT security front and center all the time by infusing it into your everyday operations.
Well-trained employees can reduce the risk of falling victim to a cyberattack by up to 70%, so creating a culture of cybersecurity is a win-win proposition.
You can create this at your business by promoting regular security touchpoints, including:
- IT security tips in company newsletters
- Cybersecurity posters
- Short weekly one-subject videos
- Quarterly team brainstorming sessions on security
- Phishing simulations to test awareness
Need Help Improving Your Technology Use in 2022?
Rocky Knoll Technologies can help your Charlotte area business come up with a strategic plan that makes sense for your needs to both optimize and reduce your risk.
Schedule a consultation by calling 704.594.7292 or reach us online.
