Small businesses can experience a lot of growth in a short amount of time with a good tech background, but it’s easy to lose it all in a hack or a critical failure.

For businesses in Salt Lake City, understanding how your local growth has national and international impact is important for profit as much as it is for becoming a hacker’s target. To stay safe in the tech world, here are a few ways that an IT company in Utah can help you secure and stabilize your systems.

Safe Permissions For Users, Computers, And Networks

Locking down computers and restricting websites is one way to keep systems for breaking down to viruses and bloated, useless programs. Unfortunately, you could ruin productivity at the same time.

Not all computer users are savvy enough to avoid the wide virus traps across the internet, no matter how skilled they are. Whether it’s a Click Here or Download Now ad that looks like a button or a phishing email that looks like a legitimate invoice, some users will click and open anything.

You need to set permissions for certain users, not just for specific groups. Most people in the business will need to browse the web and possibly download certain files, but an IT consulting group can filter all but the expected file types.

For users who need–truly need, not just want or think they have the seniority–untethered access and can prove system responsibility, specific users can be setup with modified full access.

Networks can be controlled as well. Even if all of your team is tech savvy enough to avoid viruses, they may not be using the internet the way you intend. Internally, you may want to restrict access to certain files to prevent unauthorized snooping or espionage.

Specific websites can be blocked or allowed. Specific files, folders, drives, directories, or even entire computers and servers can be restricted to specific users. There is a lot that can be done, and an IT consulting team with security experience will have the best practices for your tech safety.

Get Access With Reasonable Requests

Using firewalls to filter network access can be protective or power-hungry. It can be excessive or weak.

Before moving forward with any other security details, it’s best to leave any assumptions or old adages at the door. There is such a thing as being too secure, too paranoid, or too restrictive. Your productivity is on the line, and being distracted by small restrictions is enough for a watching and waiting hacker to sneak though.

Instead, use industry best practices and give your team a say in the matter. Rather than leaving internet access or locked down to any extreme, users should be able to submit specific websites for clearance review.

An organized and documented review system will help you figure out who needs what in order to do their job, and it gives you a chance to see how your team works. Seeing a professional who knows how to gather information and reach for resources can help your business process and boost your team at the same time.

The review can be done by both you, your business team, and small business IT management professionals. It’s fairly easy to tell a purely entertainment site from a place like YouTube where both helpful information and non-business content exists, but some sites may take more thought.

While productivity is important, security is the main issue. If you reach out to an IT company in Utah, you can gather information about local tech threats, local tech resources, and how smaller websites with local information could be helpful or harmful depending on the content.

It’s the smaller sites that you really need to worry about. What may seem like an innocent, local news site could be breeding ground for a group of kids who know how to set traps for unsuspecting users. Your business represents a big target for pranksters and for-profit hackers alike.

Contact a small business IT management team in Salt Lake City to discuss other tech safety tips that could make or break your business growth in the age of big data.