10 Policies Every Small Business Should Have (and Who Owns Each One)

One question we get consistently from business owners: "What policies do we actually need?"

The answer depends on your business, but there's a core list that applies to most small and mid-sized companies. Not every employee needs to be familiar with all of them — but each one needs a clear owner, someone whose job it is to make sure the policy stays current and gets enforced.

The 10 we recommend as a starting point: Acceptable Use, Password Standards, Data Classification, Remote Access, Incident Response, Encryption Use, Email and Communications, Backup and Recovery, Mobile Device, and Vendor Risk.

That last one — Vendor Risk — is the one most businesses are missing. Your security is only as strong as the weakest access point, and in a lot of companies, that's a vendor who has more access to your systems than they need and fewer controls than you'd want.

If you're starting from scratch, don't try to tackle all 10 at once. Audit what you already have first. Check your employee handbook, your vendor onboarding paperwork, any departmental procedures that exist in writing. You probably have the bones of several policies already. The work is usually less "write from scratch" and more "find what exists, clean it up, and make it official."

Assign an owner to each one. Without ownership, nothing gets maintained.

BONUS: Consider an AI Usage Policy for your team. That's #11!

If you're not sure where to start or which policies matter most for your specific situation, that's exactly what we cover in our weekly newsletter. Head to https://itsppreview.cygentis.com to sign up — your first month includes a preview of our IT Security Program Implementation guide, which walks through this process in detail.