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Cyber Threats, A Big Problem for Your Small Business?

With the boom in technology cyber security has become a hot topic in the news today. We are constantly hearing about large scale data breaches. Back in 2013 Target was all over the news when they had a massive data breach affecting millions of customers.  Credit monitoring, lawsuits, and infrastructure upgrades cost the company millions. What we don’t hear about in the news is the large percentage of small businesses that get hacked. For many these breaches are catastrophic and end with the business closing.

Large companies have significantly more resources in place to prevent cyber-attacks. They have suites of tolls to prevent denial of service attacks, malicious software, and malware outbreaks  in real time. Additionally, big corporations tend to have dedicated security professionals on their IT staff.

SMB Cybersecurity Concerns

Small businesses can take some simple steps to minimize their risk of a cyber threat.

We can train employees on the best practices to help keep network secure. IT can create policies to ensure they are using strong passwords and keeping them safe. TEchnology services can provide status updates to keep them up to date on the latest security concerns in the marketplace.

Since each employee plays a role in the business and therefore its cybersecurity, all employees should remain aware of cyber threats and be able to report anything suspicious

Take Preventive Steps

Regular updates are a crucial part of keeping your network safe. All software including apps, browsers and operating system should be updated regularly to ensure security enhancements are up to date. You can easily do this by setting any application that allows to automatically update, but engaging a third party in patch management will also reduce the risk of a patch negatively impacting your IT environment.

Also, regular backups are crucial to keeping your data safe. If data is lost it can cause small businesses valuable time and resources trying to recover data and potentially end up with a huge expense and lost data.

When it comes to avoiding cyberattacks, small businesses are often forgot about. With high-profile cases focusing on large corporations, many small business owners mistakenly believe that they will not be at risk, even though the figures show otherwise with large numbers of small businesses having experienced some sort of cyberattack in the past few years.

Although small businesses do not often have the time, money or resources to deal with cybersecurity in the same way larger businesses do, it’s ultimately down to everybody in a company to work to avoid cyberattacks.