Bill Collins, director of national accounts at Servco, and Hasshi Sudler, professor at Villanova University and chairman and CEO of Internet Think Tank, discuss ways you can improve your company’s cybersecurity to safeguard its information.

“The biggest mistake [is] a failure to plan ahead for when your business is going to be breached,” Collins says. “It’s not a matter of if; it’s a matter of when, so if you don’t have a plan in place, you’re not going to know how to react.”

Collins also says it is important to update your systems regularly and back up your information. However, firms can do more than just plan for the inevitable time when they are hacked.

“One of the most important things to do is to make sure you are deploying anti-virus tools on your machines,” Sudler says. “It’s the easiest way to make sure that any type of malicious software is being detected that will save you in the long-term in terms of having infections on your machines.”

Another thing Sudler says companies can do to prevent hacking is making sure employees have good password “hygiene” and do not use the same password for many different accounts.

“If [hackers] can guess your password once, people typically do repeat the use of their passwords across many different accounts, so what [hackers will] simply do is go to other accounts they believe you are using and they’ll use those exact same credentials,” Sudler says.