Written by Data breaches can damage small businesses beyond repair, with an average cost of $117,000 per incident. That is huge, especially when that money is better spent on supplies, payroll, marketing and other necessities. Use these security tips to harden your defenses against opportunistic hackers and protect your field service business.
1. Staff Education
Appropriate training prevents many avenues for attack, such as people opening up email attachments or someone entering their username and password on a spoofed page. You don’t have to go in-depth on security issues. Keep the information relevant to the situations that your employees encounter at the office and when they’re at a job site.
2. Password Management
A robust password policy can prevent brute force attacks from accessing your user accounts. Ensure that all passwords use uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and special characters, and are longer than seven characters. Ideally, you change these passwords every month.
3. Secure Field Service Software and Third-Party Apps
Choose field service software vendors with a strong focus on security. Apply the same selection process to any third-party apps that you use to keep your company running. Find out whether they have suffered data breaches in the past, the ways they protect your data, their encryption methods and their disaster recovery policies.
4. User Access Control
One cybersecurity best practice for field service businesses revolves around the principle of least privilege. Your user accounts should give enough permissions for your staff to do their job and nothing more. Most of your people don’t need administrative access to critical systems, so structure user accounts accordingly. mHelpDesk offers roles with varying permission levels to make this easier.
5. Updated Devices and Software
Software and hardware vendors release security patches to account for the latest threats. By keeping devices, software and operating systems updated, you close these exploits and create a safer field service infrastructure.
6. Regular Security Strategy Audits
Revisit your IT security strategy every six months to one year. The types of attacks hackers use change over time, as well as the preventative measures that can protect you from their efforts. If your field service business is significantly larger than before, check that your current security policies, software and hardware account for this.
7. Clean User Accounts
Remove access from ex-employees, inactive accounts and external partners once they’re no longer needed. You don’t want someone to have access to your systems when they’re no longer working for or with your company. Some platforms automate the activation, deactivation and deletion of user accounts based on set parameters.
8. Awareness of Major Threats
You don’t need to be an IT security expert, but reading up on the latest prevalent threats allows you to take preventative measures against them. Set up refresher training for your staff and look into new security measures when the risk is higher.
Modern software and hardware provide many benefits for your field service business. However, it’s important to keep IT security in mind to limit the possibility that you get hit with an expensive data breach.
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Last modified: May 2, 2018
