With Ontario reopening after a long and trying time for many businesses, it’s more important than ever to prepare your company for growth and safety online.
If your digital presence is insecure, your business can go through downtime, customer data can be leaked and/or removed, someone could steal or hack your website, impersonating you and scamming people — the list of potential consequences is endless and alarming.
These consequences can prevent you from scaling your business and your growth potential has a cap if you’re not protecting yourself.
Growing your business means growing risk and the finances and logistics to manage it, so you need to be prepared and ready to adapt.
What is Scaling?
Scaling means to multiply the results of your business without multiplying your resources.
For many business models, you can do this by automating sales, marketing and manufacturing processes.
It’s a business owner’s dream, but attempting it can easily turn into a nightmare if your business is insecure and you don’t have the support and information you need.
It’s typically a steep learning curve on your own, but we make it a lot easier to understand and develop by educating our clients about cybersecurity in basic language and guiding them through the process.
Here are four important things to keep in mind when you work toward scaling your business.
1. Grow your cybersecurity resources at the same rate as your business growth
You wouldn’t buy more merchandise than you can sell or use and the same is true for digital services.
You also wouldn’t want to slow down or stall your growth until you can bring your security up to speed.
Say you grow your sales by 300%, but your cybersecurity is set up to only react to problems that have already happened and you only have enough capacity to manage minor events.
You either run a huge risk of being unprotected with a large customer base, or you have to keep new customers at bay until you mitigate the risk enough to take them on.
That’s like flushing money down the toilet because you don’t have a safe place to hide it.
You don’t have to.
To ensure you get a return on your investment in cybersecurity, you want to get a plan that you can grow in tandem with your business’s growth and evolving needs.
Our Toronto managed IT services carefully assess your needs on a regular basis, recommend adjustments and put them into action as required.
Contact us today to learn more.
2. Be prepared to modify your security plan when sudden changes occur
Think of ransomware as a dragon that can appear out of nowhere. Be ready to slay it at a moment’s notice to prevent downtime, PR crises and other major losses that can prevent, stall or regress your scaling efforts.
3. Create workflows for administrative tasks and security screening
If you’re relying on staff surveillance to catch risks and dangerous events, you’re probably going to miss some of them and not notice until the damage has been done.
You also will not have the capacity to respond quickly, plus that’s a lot of labour to finance. It’s much better to invest in more efficient monitoring.
Ask us how we can create and manage automated workflows, so you can monitor and screen to prevent losses while focusing on strategies that increase sales.
4. Empower your team with security knowledge
A lot of scams and other infiltration events occur because staff inadvertently enabled them.
One especially alarming case of this was a non-profit that lost $650,000 to hackers in a business email compromise attack that allowed someone to create an email account with a company’s domain (ie person@company.com) and then tricked a staff member into sending money to it.
We show your team best practices for security that will help safeguard your data and keep your system running fast and smooth and we also provide DNS protection services to prevent people from using your domain to pretend to represent your company.
When you can prove to prospective and existing customers that your system is fast and secure, they’re more likely to feel comfortable doing business with you and referring you.
And you need referrals and regular customers to scale your business (our productivity services can help you with that, too!).
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As work from home measures from COVID-19 have heightened the demand for remote work, cybersecurity has become even more important to minimize the risks and capitalize on the opportunities of this way of working.
When your company is equipped for remote work, you can attract and retain top talent from literally all over the world.
VBS client Holly Robert’s of Roberts Plastics Ltd. found that their new cloud services made distance easier. She shared in her review on our website:
“Our new technology allows us the option to work from anywhere, which has been convenient since the new location is further from home.
We’ve also automated certain aspects of our business that has helped better serve our customers.”
Thank you for your IT services review, Holly! We are very proud to play a key role in helping companies create and enhance systems for remote work.
Support, leadership, productivity and skills are the cornerstones of scaling, so opening your doors to new talent digitally can also open up growth.
You are no longer limited to local candidates and you won’t miss out on people who don’t want to go back to the office.
We’ve created a guide to help you choose the IT company that’s best for your needs.
Download the PDF 21 Questions You Should Ask Before Selecting a Computer Support Company here.
No sign-up required!
Click here to download
