If you have plans to get a startup off the ground, you know you’ll probably have limited financial resources with which to do it. Unless you have unlimited money, you must watch your spending in all areas. You need the bare essentials to get the startup off the ground, and you may not have any more than that, at least at first.
Once the startup finds some success and begins generating revenue, you can add to what you have. In the beginning, though, you’re running lean, and that includes the DevOps department as well.
We’ll talk about DevOps in the following article a little bit, and we’ll also go over startup security measures and how these two relate to each other.
What Your Security Measures Protect
Your startup’s security measures might take different forms. They might be password-protected devices, two-factor authentication, and more.
With your startup’s security measures, you are probably trying to protect things like your applications, data, and networks. You also will want to watch out for your systems and the people with whom you’re dealing. That includes both your employees and would-be customers when they start to appear.
What is DevOps?
As for DevOps, it’s a combination of tools, practices, and cultural philosophies that your business will use. No two DevOps setups will be the same because no two startups are the same. There might be similar ones if you have two companies that are operating in the same niche, but there will be certain key differences as well.
DevOps relates to your startup’s security because you can’t very well have one without the other. Your DevOps has to contain security measures because, without them, the wrong people will probably be able to penetrate your systems and networks, steal your data, and find out personal employee and customer details.
You can’t allow any of that to happen, or your startup is not going to survive. You might have to pay a ransom in a ransomware attack, or you may have to hire a crisis management firm to try and stay afloat after a significant data breach.
Security Awareness Programs
You can utilize security awareness programs as part of your DevOps. These programs are protocols that you set up applying to your startup and how you do business. They’re conduct codes your workers can follow.
They might involve things like new hire training. When you hire new workers, you will have to tell them about what security measures you have in place if they are going to use your computer network.
You might have a software suite that you rented using the software as a service model, or SaaS. You can assign the new worker an employee ID number or a name-based login, and they can sign into the system that way. You will probably have them choose a password or assign them one.
What Else Might These Programs Entail?
You might also have anti-phishing testing as part of your security awareness program or protocol. You can often hire ethical hacking companies that can test your network to see if anyone has broken in or any there have been any unauthorized transactions.
You can talk to your workers about phishing attacks as well, and also other common cyberattack forms. You need to make this training a part of your standard business culture.
You can regard these sorts of steps as your DevOps human side. This is the best way to retain the proper security measures you want: you’re training your workers, while at the same time, you have technology-based security features. This combination ought to stop most threats.
Security Training Programs
There are also security training programs that you might implement, which are a little different from security awareness programs. A training program asks your workers to ramp up their threat preventative measures more than a passive awareness program does.
With security training, you are trying to address a measurable objective. You are looking to reduce security incidents or perhaps to improve your code quality. You can bring your IT department in on this since it should be mainly their purview.
If you implement one of these programs, it might be after a hacker attack, but you don’t necessarily need to wait for one in order to set up such an exercise. It’s better to be proactive about these training programs since hacker attacks are so common these days.
Physical Threats
The last part of startup security, from a human behavior standpoint rather than a strictly technology-based DevOps one, is that you need to watch out for anyone unauthorized who’s trying to penetrate your brick-and-mortar locations. Maybe you have a strictly eCommerce business model, and you don’t have either any stores or a central location where all your employees work. If so, you can skip over this part.
Assuming that not all of your employees work from home and you have a physical store location to protect, the main thing you need to watch out for is anyone trying to enter the property who should not be there. If you have lobby security who can ask each person who enters what their business is, that’s a logical place to start.
You can assign each of your employees an electronic swipe card they can swipe at the desk before they leave the lobby. This way, your security staff can tell that the individual works there.
The longer your security staff is there, the more they will recognize the workers. As long as you don’t have a lot of employee turnover, the security guards will know to stop anyone who they don’t know by sight. They’ll know the visitors versus the workers, which is helpful.
DevOps will almost always have a human side, and if you have a startup that’s about to go live and open its doors to the public, you should not neglect it. Online security measures matter, but the humans working for your company have to do their part as well.
