The most important and most neglected aspect of your online business are your Internet Assets. The surprising thing is how these assets are taken for granted – until they are lost.
Your Internet Assets are difficult to manage because almost everything is intangible – you don’t see them or think of them the same way you see or think about your inventory. Normally you insure your inventory from theft, fire, etc. What about you Internet Assets?
Your website is tangible, but all those features/services required to run the website are usually intangible. Do you think of your Domain Name as an asset?
Maybe this has happened to you already. You are sipping your morning coffee, turn on your computer and your website is simply not there!
Now you wonder what the heck could have gone wrong? Is it my computer? Is it my Internet connection? Is it the browser? Quick, call the IT guy. Your IT guy is not picking up his phone. Tick, tock, tick, tock! My business may be offline and I don’t know what to do!
Finally your IT guy arrives. He’s not sure what has gone awry. Let’s call the Host of the website. They say the server is fine. Your IT guys asks, “Where is the Domain Name hosted?“. You reply, “I don’t know, we bought that…like 10 years ago.“
After much agonizing, you find that the Domain Name expired because you no longer have the original email account that receives the notices (to renew). Now you have to buy your domain name again (hopefully no one else was waiting to pick it up), and that takes time. The DNS takes a while to come back up. You may be offline all day or more.
And that is just one of your many Internet Assets. Even small businesses have dozens of logins to various accounts that underpin the business – Internet Assets.
You will be surprised, as you start to make a list, how many of these little intangible things you have – that are all required to keep your online business running smoothly.
When you employ 3rd parties to run your online business, and almost every business does, its a real challenge to manage the Assets that they need access to. Do they have the ability to lock you out of your own Assets. When was the last time you could not find your login to Yelp or Facebook because the person who was managing it left and didn’t share the new password?
You might ask at this point, what does this have to do with Internet Marketing? Honestly, it is tangential. But someone has to do it and no one else will champion the cause.
Your IT support only maintains the few assets within their domain. They don’t care about the login to your shopping cart. Who has that login? The developer? There are many individuals who help to maintain your online business. Each has a few assets within their domain. What happens when one of them leaves? They are not thinking about your logins and passwords as they pack-up their things. What if they are disgruntled? They might spitefully implement 2-factor security using their personal mobile phone? (did you anticipate that one? It’s a killer!)
You need a policy in place before hand to avoid these disasters, so that your employee cannot later excuse themselves by saying, “you never told me”. We help you develop official policies required to smoothly manage employee and 3rd parties access to your Internet Assets.
We have seen lost Internet Assets wreak havoc on businesses. Just as a fire severely disrupts and might even bankrupt a business, lost Internet Assets can do the same. Out of necessity, we secure your Internet Assets before such an emergency can wreck your day.