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The biggest challenge companies face in tackling IS security risks is the growing sophistication of hackers and other cyber-criminals. Organizations must now contend with a range of hi-tech attacks orchestrated by well-organized, financially-motivated criminals. While large organizations often have independent IS security staffs, it is likely that your start-up can focus on just a couple of basic items, such as:
- Identifying the value of information stored on your computer(s) and making sure that access to such information is restricted to employees who need to use for legitimate business purposes. For example, your customer database and customer profitability analyses should be protected as you would not want such information to fall into the hands of a competitor as the result of actions taken by a disloyal employee.
- Computers sometimes break down (“crash”). This is why it is important to have a procedure of backing up critical files on a daily basis, and have written, tested procedures to recover needed information from backup files quickly. Organizations have gone out of business as a result of failed computer systems that were not properly backed-up.
If you have a website, you will need to be sure that it is adequately protected from both internal and external threats. We discuss Internet risks in the next section.
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