You’ve probably heard about all the recent major data breaches in the last few years. Nearly 100 million people were affected by the top 10 biggest data leaks of this year—and 2021 is far from over.
ClearVoice Research, ParkMobile, and Astoria Company are just some companies that have experienced a data breach this year. These might not be as big a name as, say, Facebook, but they are still businesses that thousands (if not millions) of people use daily, whether they know it or not.
Of course, big companies are usually the ones who experience data breaches, at least based on the news. But let’s not forget about the small businesses, where such things can happen without making any headlines.
No matter how big or small you are, the importance of cybersecurity to your business is monumental.
At least big companies have the resources to recover from such issues. Smaller companies can sink entirely if a substantial part of their base loses confidence in their ability to safeguard customer information.
All it takes is one data breach to affect the lives of your employees, customers, and anyone else who might be affected by what you do. Once hackers get access to information like names, addresses, and phone numbers—not to mention your Social Security number and credit card information— they can cause all sorts of havoc that smaller businesses will find hard to recover from.
One of the easiest ways of shoring up the cybersecurity of your company is using multifactor authentication.
Instead of just keying in your password to log in, multifactor authentication requires an additional step, like a one-time password sent to your phone or a fingerprint.
Hackers might get your email password, but without access to your phone or fingerprint, they wouldn’t be able to break into your account.
We go over three of the most compelling reasons to hop aboard the multifactor authentication train below:
Protection from Cyber-attacks
The chief benefit of implementing multifactor authentication in your business, however small it might be, is protecting yourself—and your customers—from any cyber-attacks.
You might think no self-respecting hacker would find the time to target your small business. But setting up a simple 2-factor authentication for your business email account, for instance, takes no longer than 30 seconds. That short amount of time could very well spell the difference in case you do get hacked.
You might not think you have any data worth stealing, but typical hackers work on a wide scale and might try hacking into your company’s email account just to get their hands on any sensitive information they find there that could help them get into bigger accounts later.
The sooner you implement multifactor authentication, the better protection you’ll have from cyber-attacks. Your customers will also be happier with such added security measures, especially if you accept credit card payments.
More Accountability from Employees
It’s common for multiple employees to share one password for an office account. For instance, if you forget the password to log into a database that you need for work, you likely won’t think twice to just ask for a co-worker’s credentials instead.
While this is an understandable short-term fix, an office-wide lackadaisical attitude toward cybersecurity is just begging for trouble.
Implementing multifactor authentication can help avoid such situations, especially in larger offices where more employees need access to different accounts throughout the workday.
Multifactor authentication also helps create a clear audit trail that will be helpful if something goes wrong, as one account is tied only to one person.
This will make choosing the right IT personnel and other employees that much easier since you will be able to identify those who abide by the rules and those who don’t.
Nurturing Your Company’s Reputation
It might be tempting to look at the development of multi-factor authentication as an issue only relevant to larger companies, but small business owners would do well to implement it nonetheless.
Even if you’re not accepting credit card payments or storing your customers’ sensitive data, you can still be a target for hackers.
If you do store sensitive information and your business does get hacked, one of the first things any insurance company would ask you is if you had taken measures to protect yourself from cyber-attacks—and having multi-factor authentication in place would answer that question affirmatively.
This is especially important for companies that deal with site assessment and risk management. When you handle sensitive information, your clients have a reasonable expectation of their data’s safety.
Your reputation will take a major hit if you lose clients because you did not take the necessary precautions to keep their information safe. Your share of that market will only get smaller if you don’t implement multifactor authentication soon.
In such fields, it hardly matters that you did not leak that information intentionally; what matters is it was leaked.
Implementing multifactor authentication is an excellent way of preparing against such possibilities.
It’s important to get ahead of the cybersecurity curve by implementing multifactor authentication for your business. Not only is it one of the most basic security protocols you can implement, but it’s also one of the most effective.
