Looking for a few ways to quickly protect your data and IT infrastructure from cybercriminals? Here are two great places to start. The first is so obvious that almost everyone overlooks it, especially in smaller companies where there is little time for proactive training on any topic.

Employee Training

If you’re looking for the quickest tool to protect your digital assets from cyber criminals, adopt a plan for ongoing, long-term employee training. Of all the tricks criminals use to attack and steal your customer and business data, phishing scams are still one of the most successful. Most common are the emails that contain links that lead to fake websites. Similar schemes simply send a link that, when used, downloads malware to the employee’s computer and suddenly criminals have access to your data. Other common email tricks that people STILL fall for request personal data that can be used for identity theft. Training your employees to recognize potential scams is a low cost but very useful line of defense

Data Storage

Your data is really valuable. How you store it really matters. Small businesses often give little thought to the claims that data can be compromised or lost. Moving your data to cloud storage—getting it off a local server or PC—has a number of advantages. While it might seem intuitive that keeping all of your data stored in-house is safest, that likely isn’t the case. Despite the availability of firewalls, virus protections programs, etc. in most cases a small business doesn’t have the resources to protect its data that large cloud storage services provide. If your physical location is struck by fire or a weather event, you could be out of luck. Even if your backups are stored off-site, there will be significant downtime. With the Cloud, your data will be stored in more than one physical location. Should some catastrophic event incapacitate one cloud server farm, another mirrored location elsewhere in the country or worldwide will give you access to your data with no delay.