5 Tips For Keeping Small Businesses Secure

Small- to midsized businesses have many faces. Some companies may truly be mom and pop firms run out of a garage, yet others are substantial businesses with 50- to 100 employees. Any way you cut it, opting to spend money on security technology costs money.

That’s why the Better Business Bureau (BBB) in tandem with the National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA) adopted the cybersecurity framework for critical infrastructure developed a couple of years ago by NIST and DHS and applied it to SMBs.

The BBB and NCSA honed the federal government’s framework into a five-step process that companies can follow to deploy security infrastructure and policies.

“We took the basic concepts outlined by NIST and DHS and streamlined it for SMBs, says Bill Fanelli, the BBB’s chief security officer. “For example, SMBs may not always need to spend money on technology. There may be better ways to set email policies, for example, that help them reduce risk, moves that generally don’t cost money.”

Michael Kaiser, executive director of the NCSA, says the framework developed by NIST and DHS provides a great deal of clarity for how organizations can get started with cybersecurity.

“Along with the BBB, we’ve been trying to educate small companies for several years, and the NIST and DSH guidelines really gave us a good place to start,” he added.

In honor of National Cyber Security Awareness Month, here is a look at that five-step process developed by the BBB and NCSA.

(SMBs can also find numerous other cybersecurity resources by clicking on these links: BBB, NCSA, the National Small Business Association and the Small Business Administration).