Entrepreneurs today constantly focus on how they can grow their companies using whatever resources and capital they have. However, scaling a company isn’t just about increasing revenues and sales. It is easier for entrepreneurs to dream of an overnight success and scale their company but it takes a lot more than that. When you are thinking and planning of scaling your company you also have to focus on how you would have the right strategy that is executable in the long term.
Additionally, while you are scaling your company you also need to focus on how you can improve the security to prevent data breaches and other risks involved while ensuring seamless usability allowing employees to perform productively.
Let’s take a quick look at ways to balance security and usability when scaling your company.
Know the Risks Involved
Even before you focus on the solutions that would help you improve security without compromising the usability you need to focus on the risks involved. Different companies have different needs and requirements. Data breaches and various types of cyber attacks can disrupt a company’s operations and hack into confidential data and information.
A data breach costs $4.45 million on average. Hence, most companies have common risk factors that they need to prepare against. However, each company has to identify what factors impact their business how and what devices and networks they need to protect. The company must measure and assess various security risks before it allocates its resources accordingly.
Test Various Programs
While there are many programs that you can use for better security you also need to test them and evaluate the results. This is essential because you want to focus on how you can have a system that works in the real world. Testing various programs and tools would allow you to know their advantages and disadvantages. You can also let the employees and stakeholders use the programs and get their feedback and suggestions to further help you improve the security and usability factors. If you are planning to use an enterprise access management tool you need to make sure that you know its features and test them to your business requirements.
Use Robust Security Policies
One of the best ways to balance security and usability is to have robust security policies that would make a difference. Having a strong security policy ensures that all the employees and stakeholders within the company have clarity about how they should work within the system. Having clear and simple security policies would ensure that there are no misunderstandings. Also, you must communicate newer security policies with the employees and stakeholders to help them stay updated. Security policies about strong passwords, incident response and access control would help employees to comply with the policies set by the company.
Provide Awareness Training
Not all human beings are the same. This means that not all employees and stakeholders in the company would understand the hazards and mistakes related to the company’s security. Educating the employees and various users across the company is a good way to improve security while keeping the usability factor intact. Keeping the users aware of how to use security tools, recognize issues and report malicious activities would ensure that your system is safe from data breaches without having to do much. Hence, you must focus on security awareness training and incentives that would allow employees to stay aware and report as and when required.
Try Seamless Integration
One of the best ways to balance security and usability is to integrate security seamlessly into the entire business process. This can make a huge difference to how you can add security at various points within the business process. When you integrate security in your business process most employees and stakeholders are aware of their role and the actions that they need to take to be productive without having to compromise the security factor. For this, you need to talk to them and get information on what they work on and how they can provide you with relevant feedback and suggestions that would help you to integrate security seamlessly into the business process. With this, you can encourage a sense of collaboration within the company and improve security and usability.
Keep It Simple
Various companies today choose different programs and software that help minimize data breaches and other security risks. However, having complex software would only complicate matters further. Simpler programs are easier for everyone to understand. This means that you do not have to spend a lot of time training the employees. Also, simpler security programs allow employees at all levels to make use of it productively. You must also ensure that the security tools you use are reliable, scalable and effective to help you protect your business from cyber attacks of all types. If you are using more than one security tool you must have clarity on how they work collectively without confusing the employees and the stakeholders.
Incorporate Biometrics
When you are growing your business you would want to focus on better security without compromising the productivity of the users and employees. Incorporating biometrics would be one way to ensure that you can retain the security levels in your business. This also gets rid of using passwords which can get stolen or hacked. However, when you incorporate biometrics you need to focus on how well you implement it and also provide training on how to use it the right way.
Regular Updates
When you are scaling your business you would want to focus on how things change which would help you enhance, tweak and update the security policies and programs accordingly. Hence, you need to focus on how you can regularly update the security policies and even make changes to various systems that are used by employees and stakeholders. Incorporating a sense of security in the company culture would also allow you to get regular feedback which would help you make regular changes to adapt to how the workforce works. This would allow you to heighten the security levels in your company while ensuring that all employees can use the system without any inconvenience.
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