Do These 3 Things to Keep Your Business Safe and Secure

We all want to keep our businesses as safe and secure as possible. Creating a startup is never going to be easy and you’re going to have to invest a whole lot of time, effort and money into every aspect of the business to ensure it stays up and running.

There’s product development to focus on. There’s market research to be conducted. There are advertising and marketing campaigns to curate. If you’ve succeeded so far and your business is succeeding, expanding and generating sales, you’re not going to want to let your hard earned profits slip through your fingers.

So, how can you achieve this goal? Well, the first step you need to take is to identify areas where your business can face threats. Then, you need to put up barriers against them. Here are a few key ones you need to really focus on.

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Intellectual Theft

You put a lot of effort into creating your products. You spend a whole lot of time and money making sure they’re worth bringing to life, that people will pay money for them, that you’ve packaged them well, that you generate enough hype about them that people will buy them. So, imagine how frustrating it would be to pour all of this effort and money into creating something, just for someone else to start producing it as well and profiting off your hard work! The good news is that there are a number of intellectual property laws in place that allow you to protect your products in this way. Here are some to consider.

Enforce Confidentiality

The first step that you need to take is to enforce confidentiality around your products and the way your business works. No matter who you may be working with – employees, freelancers or anyone else who has access to your business’ private data and plans –  you should enforce some sort of confidentiality from them. This is easily achieved by putting clauses into their contracts to make sure that they can’t use your ideas themselves or sell your ideas on to your competitors.

Copyright and Trademarking

Another step you can take is to copyright and trademark your products, brand and anything else associated with your business. These are both legal processes that make it so nobody else can use any of your intellectual property, such as your brand name, your logo, specially designed fonts you may use, your taglines, your jingles or anything else you might have come up with!

Stock Theft

Another type of theft that you have to concern yourself with is theft of stock – the actual products you intend to sell. When it comes to protecting your store shelves and stock rooms, it’s good to hire a security guard who can keep an eye on customers browsing the aisle. You can also invest in CCTV, which will stave off potential thieves and capture evidence that can be used to prosecute those who do go ahead and attempt to steal from you.

Unfortunately, members of the public aren’t always the only ones you need to worry about. You should remember that sometimes staff can steal too. It’s a good idea to issue lanyards, perhaps a silicone lanyard option, that will admit access to important areas to certain members of staff. Then you can track who’s been where and find the culprit if staff starts to go missing.

Data Theft

Let’s not forget the seriousness of data theft. Your business’ data can be worth a fortune to cyber criminals and online scammers. They can use it to carry out identity theft and data theft, which can also allow them to drain people’s bank accounts – whether those people are your customers, employees or anyone else whose details you have in your systems.

Backup

Failing to protect data can result in huge legal fines, a loss of your customers’ confidence and respect and general chaos. So, make sure you have sufficient IT solutions and protection in place to ensure that your data is fully protected and backed up!

These are just a few different ways to keep your business up and running without facing safety and security threats. Sure, there are a number of other areas you can focus on. But these are some of the biggest and most common areas that are targeted, and consequently are some of the areas that you should focus on the most.