Cyberattacks and data breaches are increasing daily. Cybercriminals are getting smarter, and the amount of compromised data is increasing rapidly. Even with breaches becoming more common, most companies are unprepared. As the owner of a small business, you need to put protective measures in place before disaster strikes. Small business VPN solutions may be just the thing you need to protect your company.
If you run a small business, don’t assume you’re too small for the hackers to bother with. More than 40% of cyber-attacks are intended for small businesses.
A Virtual Private Network (VPN) is one of the most important tools to keep businesses protected from data breaches.
Your office has a network that accesses printers, connects to IT resources and transfers data. It protects your team from questionable websites. It helps keep your business’s data secure. But have you ever thought about how to extend that security and all that data and resources that are available in your office to remote workers? Everyone working in the office can easily access the network, but remote workers can’t login. They need a remote access VPN.
Using a VPN means your remote employees can log on to your office network from anywhere that has access to the internet. Then they will have access to the resources they need to do their jobs, and your business data is still secure.
What happens when you access the internet using public Wi-Fi connections? People do this all the time without a second thought, especially as it makes it so easy to work from anywhere. Using public Wi-Fi can actually be really dangerous from an IT security perspective. Unfortunately, these public Wi-Fi connections don’t always have the safest of security systems. Hackers can get anything from your company database to your payroll system simply by watching the data traffic that is going across a public Wi-Fi space. Public Wi-Fi does not encrypt traffic, and it has very little security to speak of. When you connect to public Wi-Fi you open yourself up to this commonly used exploit.
By connecting to a VPN service as soon as you’re online, you establish an encrypted tunnel to the internet. Yes, the risk of hackers still exists, but anyone monitoring what you’re doing will only see meaningless encrypted garbage that they can do nothing with. Immediately, you’ve eliminated a very real online risk.
With a VPN service you can control access of what information is available to the employees. Access control systems authenticate and authorize users verifying that the person is who they claim to be, and authorizing the appropriate permissions. Without proper access control, the right people might not have enough access or the wrong people might have too much access.
A VPN is a great solution to secure your business data for users who work remotely or must be on the move regularly. By applying a VPN across your networks, you can make those networks much more robust and secure. And any Internet-connected device can use a VPN to be a part of a private network.
Whether you operate a large enterprise a small team of freelancers you need a VPN to ensure your business data does not fall into the wrong hands. By using a VPN, you can rest well at night that your sensitive business information is secure.
Jared Payne is the owner of IT Ninjas (https://itninjas.com) a managed IT support company based in Mesa, Arizona serving the greater Phoenix area.
