Running a business always throws up some difficult situations that have to be dealt with. Glitches are par for the course. Then there are nightmare scenarios where the floor fall out from under your feet and you have to respond immediately to protect your business. Here are three scary situations you might find yourself in, and how to keep cool if they do.
The Undead
It’s unfortunate, but sometimes employees misbehave in such a way that they just have to be fired, or at least not rehired when their contract is up. Sometimes staff leave voluntarily if they clash with management or find a position elsewhere that’s more to their liking. Ideally, it will be a clean break, but that doesn’t always happen. A disgruntled ex-employee with inside knowledge of your business can make your life very complicated.
Social media can be used by former employees to virtually haunt your business. Social networks like Facebook and Twitter make it easy for them to broadcast a negative picture of your business. There are also employer review websites, like LinkedIn. At Glassdoor, their views on your business can even be posted anonymously. One or two incidences can be annoying, but if it’s on a larger scale it might spook people and put them off working with or for you.
Resident Evil
In the computer game ‘Resident Evil’, a group of people fight a big corporation. In your business, you can avoid trouble by limiting the damage they can do. Make sure account authorization powers they had are deleted and disabled. Vengeful ex-employees have been known to get into IT systems and corrupt them, sometimes by planting malware or viruses.
Sometimes former employees with IT know-how have engineered a way into your network while in the job, outside of company security policy. It may be necessary to do a full network audit to make sure your system hasn’t been tampered with. Your plan to protect your business should include removing former users immediately, before they can do any damage.
Trick or Treat?
There are threats to your business that can be just as damaging as a revenge attack on your network. You might be vulnerable to the theft of your company data and intellectual property, including confidential client data which you are obliged to protect. A study by the security experts, Symantec, indicated that almost half of all fired employees had kept some corporate information, and 40% of them planned on using that data in their new employment. Whether this is a huge problem or not will depend on the nature of your data, but you should protect your business against it just in case.
It’s not easy to prevent your data being taken in this way, but there are things you can do to stop the data being used against you. You can include a non-compete agreement in your employment contracts, for example. Prevention is better than cure, so you should set up your systems so that people only have access to the company data that they need to do their job. This will at least limit the scale of the damage that could be caused.
Running a business can be scary sometimes, and you can do without your business being harmed by ex-employees. Quikteks can help you to protect your business, secure your network against threats and safeguard your data, to stop former employees returning to haunt you. To find out exactly how we can help protect your business, call us today at (973) 882-4644.