The Importance of Protecting Your Business Technology and Software

We live in a very fast-paced, data-driven and people-centric world today. Technology has grown in leaps and bounds, and it is a challenge to keep up with. Business owners who want to stay competitive in their industry need to vie for their consumers’ attention with all sorts of technological advances. Here are different ways a company can protect its business technology and software.

Patents

An organization that excels in delivering specialized products to consumers can protect their intellectual property by filing for a patent with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. This secures the legal rights of the property owner to prevent competitors from stealing, mass-producing and benefiting from their inventions. In exchange for this right, the company needs to publicly disclose the recipe for its design. A patent filing is a lengthy and drawn-out process but it is worth the investment to protect a novel development that would benefit the masses.

To protect a company further, it can require its employees to sign off their rights to any intellectual property created during employment as part of the hiring process. This will ensure that the business owns all patent rights instead of the employee.

Continuing Education

Employers who invest in the continuing education of their workers will reap the benefits of employee retention and loyalty. A technologically-driven company may look into sponsoring their ambitious employees in programs such as online ms in computer engineering and other relevant fields. Many of these programs do not require commuting or taking a leave of absence from work but can be done remotely during company time. An employer can monitor the progress of its student employees by collaborating with the program provider.

The benefit of this type of employee care is that any skill gap can be filled in through this channel instead of having to dedicate additional resources to recruit temporary specialized personnel. In addition to receiving a possible salary raise from a company-sponsored advanced educational program, a student employee will be more motivated to remain with the company.

Backups

Since most business is conducted and maintained on computers these days, a company is wise to invest in a digital storage and backup infrastructure. Computing devices need to be fault-tolerant so that normal business continues to function despite any setback due to device failure or power outage. The company should consider an additional reliable backup strategy such as cloud storage.

There are various types of backup strategies that a company can employ. A full-backup is where everything on the company servers is saved. An incremental or differential backup is where only new changes are saved after an initial full backup has been conducted. A mirror backup is where an identical copy of your server data is stored elsewhere outside the company facility. This type of backup is often deployed on the cloud.

Security

A company can establish a secure virtual campus for its employees by deploying a firewall surrounding its computer networks. A firewall blocks off unwanted external access to one’s computer system and filters out incoming malware threats from attacking the internal networks. Besides monitoring employee activity on its networks, an employer can configure the firewall to only access an approved list of external domains.

As additional security, a company may utilize a VPN or Virtual Private Network to enable its employees to access its internal networks from any external computing devices such as laptops, desktops and mobile phones while outside the company’s physical domain. An organization with multiple brick-and-mortar locations and branches will be able to take advantage of this secure channel or tunnel to connect with one another remotely. Telecommuting is made possible and reliably through this mechanism.

Cybersecurity is just as much a priority as protecting intellectual properties. With prudence, a company with a vision will remain competitive in the market for its employees and consumers. By deploying any of the above solutions, a company can confidently protect its assets including technology, software, data, and people.