5 Reasons to Formalize Your Company’s Security Program

Many companies have a strong online presence these days. Nearly any business entity has a website, and some have an app. You also might have many remote workers at this point, but you may also have some brick-and-mortar locations where your employees do in-person work.

Whatever your business model’s particulars, formalizing a security program makes sense. In this article, we’ll talk about what a security program is, and we’ll also list several reasons why you need to set one up and formalize it.

What Exactly is a Security Program?

Before we talk about formalizing your security program, we should explain precisely what we mean when we use that term. A security program is a set of policies that your workers use to make sure no danger to themselves exists. Most companies set up security programs with their clients and customers in mind as well.

Formalizing a security program means taking security-related policies you have in place and compiling them in a formal way. You’ll probably list them and post them somewhere where everyone can read them. You might turn them into a booklet or a PDF and show it to everyone who works at your company.

Now, let’s discuss some of the practical reasons for doing that.

Your Workers Will Know What to Do When Certain Situations Arise

Most people can remember fire drills they had at their school as kids. The children might line up in the hallway when an alarm sounded, and the teachers would lead them outside.

Setting up your company’s formal security program serves the same purpose. It tells your workers what to do if something ever goes wrong.

Your formal security program might mention what to do in fire situations or if there is an active shooter incident. Your program will also probably extend both to your workers’ online presence and how they should conduct themselves when doing in-person work. It should tell them how to log into your software suite, how to select their username and password, etc.

Security Protocols Can Guard Against Hackers

Hackers are one of the modern threats against which companies must guard. Hackers might try to access your network to paralyze it because they want you to pay a ransom to get it up and running again. Others might have a personal grudge against your company because you fired them or for some more obscure reason.

Your formal security program can tell your workers how to guard against hacker attacks. Your program will probably tell them how to avoid phishing attacks and what measures you have in place to protect against malware, viruses, and so forth.

Having a formal set of rules to guard against hackers is commonplace these days. If you don’t put one into effect, you open your business up to security threats.

It Makes Onboarding Easier

You probably need to hire new workers periodically. If you have a large company, you may need to hire new employees nearly every week. If your business has high turnover rates, you’ll want to find a way to streamline this process as much as you can.

If you have a formalized security program in place, you can give it to your new workers as part of the onboarding process. They might not need to know the whole thing, depending on their position within the company. You may only have to fill them in on certain parts of it.

If they know how to conduct themselves at work, from a security standpoint, you’ll feel better about them. They are less likely to make a costly mistake that can hurt the whole company.

It Makes Customer Data Leaks Less Likely

Hackers might try to get into your network for personal gain or because they hold a grudge, but anarchist hackers exist as well. Sabotaging company websites thrills them, but they might also choose to steal client data and post that for anyone to see.

If a huge data leak occurs, that can hurt a company, sometimes irreparably. Bank of America, Target, and other enormous business entities have received bad press because of data leaks. Many customers had to worry about identity theft because of insufficient security protocols.

Hackers will always try to penetrate your company’s network, but if you have a formalized security program in place, at least that’s one meaningful way to try and prevent that sort of thing from happening. A data leak means your customers will not trust you going forward, so a robust security program is necessary if you want to stay at the top of your niche.

It Makes Employee Data Leaks Less Likely as Well

Hackers can also try to steal employee data. Your workers presumably trust you with their full names, social security numbers, addresses, phone numbers, bank account routing numbers, and so forth. You need all of that information for tax purposes, to send them their paychecks, etc.

If you have strong security measures in place, it makes hacker attacks less likely which can reveal all of that sensitive information. Because of this, your workers will want you to formalize a security program just as much as you do. Neglecting to do that means no one will want to work for you because it shows you don’t care about their personal information.

Formalizing a security program is something you should do as soon as you have a business up and running. If you own a business and don’t have formal security protocols in place, you need to do that before more time passes.

Look at each business aspect and develop a way to protect it. If you’re not sure how, all kinds of security experts exist who can help you.

They might show you how your workers can stay safe online, how to reduce retail theft, how to keep unauthorized individuals from accessing your property, and more. They’ll charge you money for these services, but it’s worth it if you can use this formal security program going forward.