If you have a small business with a few workstations at the office, you’ll still need to take active steps in protecting your network. After all, you’ll never know what any of your employees could be up to while surfing the net. Although they wouldn’t will it to compromise the security of the network nor your business, some of them unknowingly do so due to lack of education. They may think there’s nothing wrong with clicking a link on a spam mail they got when that link would have linked them directly to a hacker’ s website. In other words, there has to be a way for employee’s browsing habits to be monitored and observed in order for your network technician to know what dangers he may be up against when it comes to keeping the network in good shape.

Moves to protect a network definitely need to be fully functional, which means they must not leave out any chance for the dangers to find their way into the network. There has to be an administrator who will be in charge solely of keeping it clean and working well. Sometimes, small businessmen take this for granted, not realizing that one false move by an uneducated or reckless employee can get all computers on the network to crash. Definitely, the administrator should be consistently what people using the network are using it for. There must be clear guidelines on the use of the Internet. In fact, Internet usage that is not directly related to the job at hand must be banned altogether to reduce the risk of compromising the network’s security.

Another step a businessman can take is to have network security experts conduct a seminar within the office to be attended by all network users. People usually put their computers or networks at risk due to the absence of knowledge about these risks. By carefully taking the time to inform employees about the dangers associated with certain Internet activities such as file-sharing using peer-to-peer sites and downloading software whose integrity is unknown. When people are aware of the presence of threats, they would usually take it upon themselves to be more careful an d conscious of their Internet activities in the future, unless the intention is really to compromise the network.

Of course, to make sure that important files are never affected and always accessible for retrieval in case problems with the computers or the network come up, it is recommended that all of such files be safeguarded with backups on a remote access server site. You’ll never know when a bug begins to strike and wipe out your entire hard drive. Just to not leave anything to chance, which could mean too great a loss, it is important to have backups all the time.

In terms of prevention of online risks, a good move would be to install an IP changing software. With this program, anyone on the network is able to surf the web with their IP address hidden. And when the IP is hidden, so is that link between the hacker and his victim.

By: Brad M Smith