Keep Your Home Business Secure

As all 3 of my blogs have been recently hacked, meaning I’ve had to pay someone to sort it out for me, I’m a bit more security conscious lately! Whether you run a blog as a hobby, or have a business, make sure you protect yourself.

Being security-minded in business is absolutely fundamental to ensuring that it stands the test of time, and it’s one of those things that a lot of people completely fail to consider until it is essentially too late. If you leave it too late, you might find that there is nothing left of your business, or that it at least has seen much better days, and this can be a devastating place to find yourself in. However, keeping a business is relatively simple and straightforward if you allow yourself to focus on it from the start. With that in mind, let’s take a look at some of the things you might want to consider if you run a business from home, and you want to keep it as secure as you possibly can.

Be Careful With Your Contact Details

It is generally good practice to make sure that people can easily contact you, and one of the most common ways to do this is to put those contact details on the website for the business. By all means make it so that your customers can get in touch, but remember the importance of staying safe and secure, and above all keeping the business contact details separate from your personal ones. It might seem easier at first to just use your own private contact details, but in time as the business grows this will start to be a little unsafe for you and your business. Instead, get a separate phone which is specifically for business, and only ever give that number out to business interests. This can be a mobile or a landline, as long as it is not tied to your name and it is only ever used for business purposes.

Then you should make sure that you are protecting your home address too, as you don’t really want to be giving out your own address online all the time. To exercise more caution here, you might want to think about signing up for a virtual office address instead, such as Your Virtual Office London or similar, so that you have a reputable address to give out for contacting which is not where you live. This is important, as you never know who might get hold of the information, and you don’t want unexpected guests arriving at your front door if you can help it.

Thankfully, email is not going to be quite as important, as it is generally safer anyway. But there are still some considerations to be made, as you don’t want to find yourself inundated with potential scams and viruses. Again, be selective in who you give out your email address to, and make sure that you install software which automatically scans all incoming mail. That way, you can be sure you are being as safe as necessary with all of your contact details, but without hindering the possibility of customers contacting you.

Secure Your Home

Even while being careful about your home address, you will still find that it is a good idea to protect and secure your home as best you can, probably better than you normally would do without your business being there on the premises. This is important for a number of reasons, not least the fact that you need to make sure that you are protecting your business files, computer, and so on. But more importantly, you need to make sure that you are protecting yourself and whoever might live with you, whether it’s family, friends or strangers. All of the basic things such as locking up at night and when you’re out, should always be adhered to. But you might also want to step it up a bit and install some additional security on your home, perhaps even an advanced burglar alarm for when you are not at home or asleep. You could also consider putting lights on timers when you are out, to make it look like someone is in fact in all the time. Secure your home, and you are also helping to keep your business secure, so this is clearly an important concern which you should not overlook.

Protect Your Intellectual Property

You might easily argue that within a business, the intellectual property is just as important, if not more so, than the physical goods the business owns. Clearly, your ideas are what really run the show, and if you are not protecting them then it is unlikely that you will be able to keep your business as secure as you would like it to be. In order to protect your intellectual property, you need to make sure that you are copywriting and patenting app ideas which you use in your company, and which would otherwise possibly get stolen. You might also see the value in having anyone who does any work for you sign an NDA, so that they are bound to secrecy about your business and its practices. Protecting your intellectual property is hugely important if you want your home business to be protected on the whole, so make sure that you are doing this as well as you possibly can. If you need further help, consider getting some legal advice from the likes of a lawyer or legal advisor.

Locking Your Business Room

In all likelihood, there is one room in particular where you run your business from, and as long as you are protecting that you are pretty much looking after your business on the whole. So it’s worth remembering something very basic: keep that room itself locked and protected at all times. You might even want to put an alarm on it for when you are not there – or maybe it’s just a case of making sure that you always keep sensitive items locked away. You never know who might get in there, so this is going to be a particularly important thing to take care of.

As long as you are keeping your home business secure, it is likely to have a much brighter future, so make sure that you are bearing that in mind at all times.