Automate Security Instead of Leaving It Up to Employees

Device and network security can fall a bit by the wayside until there’s a crisis. This is even truer for smaller businesses that don’t have a dedicated IT team. Meeting sales goals, preparing for an audit, and getting customer complaint statistics out of the red zone are usually far more pressing (and measurable) tasks than shoring up your systems against outages or attacks.

But downtime and data vulnerabilities get expensive quickly. If you don’t have the time or the revenue to have a dedicated IT employee, then get a managed IT support service and automate security with these three requirements:

1. Make password changes mandatory and regularly scheduled.

People don’t like changing their passwords. Typing in the right configuration of keys becomes as habitual as hitting the right keys on the keyboard throughout the day, and nobody wants to regularly upset that routine. But keeping the same password for too long puts your network at risk. Create a protocol for your operating system that mandates a password change every sixty or ninety days. Not only does that guarantee that the passwords are being changed, it roots out easy passwords. Even if your employees start with common iterations of ‘[Company]123’ and personal information, they have to create more complex ones eventually.

2. Update programs remotely.

A lot of us put off updates on our personal devices. Whether it’s the operating system requesting a shutdown in the middle of a movie, or specific programs suggesting an update but letting you click away from the reminder, it’s easy to not update. But those patches and new versions don’t just fix operational bugs. They often include new security mechanisms for new threats and modes of attack. Instead of reminding employees to update or checking computer by computer, have your IT expert force updates during a slow weekend or overnight.

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