What is network security? It is the ability of a business to secure its computer systems from being used for criminal purposes.

Yes, you don’t need to be an IT genius to understand how important this is.

For example, say you are a janitor at a school and someone walks into your building in the middle of the night, carrying a very sharp instrument. What do you do?

The first thing that you will do is take down his description (which includes the time, place and what he is carrying), change your clothes, get out of the room, and keep quiet so that you don’t upset any students or teachers. Now, what if this was the case?

After you have kept quiet for about ten minutes, he walks away without doing anything, still carrying the same sharp instrument. You head over to the computer in your office and go to find out your password. Naturally, you’ll try every possible combination that is available to you.

Well, it could be Wi-Fi access, just browsing the web, looking at some information on the internet, or using his laptop or notebook, etc. Any one of these can work as the password… and most likely, none of them will be the password you’d expect. If they are the password protection you might be in trouble, because this is the sort of thing that would make a professional hacker do.

So, if you had this happen to you, what would you do? Well, you would simply take down his description (again including the time, place and location) and try to call his name using your cell phone.

If he uses his name, then it’s password is probably some name that you can’t remember. Even if you tried all the common passwords, you still won’t know his exact password. And he could walk away again before you get his identity.

All of this is about what you can do to protect your network security.

These things can be done by you or your IT department, but they are very expensive. So, you should get into the habit of doing these things and consider the cost and the results.

The good news is that, if your business is anything like most, this is a relatively small amount of money spent per year. Even more importantly, you will see a big difference in the success of your business.

• You may also consider getting a computer forensics specialist to do this job for you,
• but that is really a good idea only if you really want to keep your business secure.
• They can also be very expensive and only professionals really can handle it.

Most network security specialists will do a very good job, but they’re not going to charge you a lot for it. What you should ask them is what part of the day they’re going to be most effective. It should be fairly easy to tell when they will be able to have the most impact.

It’s also a good idea to hire a company that offers security monitoring, because you won’t know when something will happen. Then you’ll be alerted before it happens and you can do something about it before the company gets hurt.