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Businesses large and small must guard against outside threats each and every day. Businesses are constantly under attack and the weakest vulnerability will be exploited. These threats can come in all different forms from employees, hackers, or natural disasters. Each one can cause equal damage.

According to PC Magazine, “Forrester estimates that 39% of small businesses will “significantly upgrade their security environment” and 44% will “significantly upgrade their disaster recovery capabilities” this year.”

It’s even more important for small businesses to protect themselves from threats because the aftermath can be devastating.

The first step in protecting your small business is to have a Disaster Plan.

“According to the National Archives & Records Administration, 93 percent of companies that had trouble restoring their data after a disaster were out of business within 18 months.”

A disaster plan should include ways to prevent your data from being exploited. This can be done by defining proper policies within your company. It should also define how you are going to protect your data with procedure. If someone breaks your policy whether it be an employee, contract worker, or outside element you should have a procedure in place to make sure that data doesn’t get compromised. Finally, if your data is compromised, you need to be able to eliminate it from the public. If your proprietary information is being displayed on websites or other places on the Internet you need a plan to take that information down. This is where the services from webArgos becomes invaluable.

“With today’s technology and tools, keeping a business safe doesn’t have to be a difficult or time-consuming process.”

Last week, a contract worker at a Oak Ridge National Lab was caught trying to sell nuclear secrets. Apparently he needed some extra money and thought that by stealing these secrets and selling them to a foreign government would allow him to pay off his debts.

This is a serious breath of security, and given that the low level contract worker was allowed to access this information and steal it is amazing. Fortunately, he was caught by an under cover agent acting as a potential buyer of these nuclear secrets. There’s no doubt that Oak Ridge has a policy to prevent this sort of security breach, but the procedure to follow it was not executed.

If these secrets would have been sold to a foreign government, the consequences would have been very damaging. There’s never enough security to protect proprietary information and it’s important to not only have a policy, but to also be very diligent in the procedure to protect that sort of information.

Many business owners don’t think something could happen like this at their business. However, if it happened at a high security nuclear facility, what would stop it from happening to your business?

A company’s former employees are a significant threat for confidential information loss. If not managed properly, they can post insider information to one site on the web, which can in turn spread like wildfire until there is no way for the company to contain the loss of information. In one recent high profile case, a former Dell Sales Manager posted a list of “22 confessions” outlining how a person could cheat Dell’s system to get cheaper computers than otherwise possible, abuse the warranty system to get new laptops after a model is no longer in production, how to get bargains on printer cartridges from “cool” kiosk employees, and many more secrets and strategies that only a company employee would know. The information quickly spread across the internet, but the way that Dell handled the incident caused it to become a PR disaster for the company. Read our in depth case study here.