A new survey has showed that over 700 small and medium businesses (SMB) feel more secure against increased cyberattacks based on their current IT infrastructure.
Here is a summary of interesting statistics when it comes to why businesses feel more secure against increased cyberattacks:
- 80 percent reported they feel more secure in 2021 than 2020 despite levels of cyberattacks
- 50 percent of small and medium businesses (SMB)have employees working back in the office
- 41 percent of organizations have transitioned up to 25 percent of their employees to hybrid work
- 20 percent of small and medium businesses (SMB) have implemented SD-WAN technology.
- 19 percent reported having plans implement SD-WAN technology in the next 12 months.
- 70 percent of small and medium businesses (SMB) are addressing cyberattacks as a IT security problem
- 64 percent reported data breaches as their top IT security concern.
- 73 percent of small and medium businesses (SMB) report that antivirus, anti-malware, and firewall protection are very important.
- 62 percent reported that their organization IT security is their top IT security concern.
- 28 percent of small and medium businesses (SMB) report employees are not following company guidelines.
- 27 percent reported IT security as a barrier due to budget constraints.
- 18 per cent of small and medium businesses (SMB) report lack of employee resources to proactively monitor and manage cyber security.
Here are three ways for small and medium businesses (SMB) to improve their security against increased cyberattacks.
Step 1: Be Proactive with Cyber Security
Reduce the chances that a cyber threat will impact your business as much as possible as an IT security goal. Whether your business is a target for a cyberattack or not depends on how serious your cyber security measures are there are many ways to protect against increased cyberattacks.
The financial impact of not taking action can be staggering. Ransomware attacks are becoming increasingly common for small and medium businesses (SMB). Organizations that are affected by cyber crimes often need to spend up to $10,000 to restore their data, network, and devices. Ransomware payments might seem small compared to all the associated costs of recovering from a cyber attack, but they are often just drops in the bucket compared with the costs of recovering fully from ransomware.
Step 2: Prioritize Cyber Security Prevention
Organizations still wonder how to begin to prioritize cyber security prevention. Preventing cyber security exposure and risk is the first step to protecting your business. The anti-virus and anti-malware tools that come with your computer are probably your primary line of defense if you’re like most small and medium businesses (SMBs).
Even though those rudimentary tools are free, there is a reason why they are included. Your systems will be protected from some known cyber security threats, but advanced threats, which occur every 39 seconds, cannot be stopped by this simple tools. If you want to achieve the highest level of cyber security, you will need proactive cyber security prevention methods and technologies that can limit the range of cyber-attacks on your applications and systems.
In-house implementation of this step generally requires specialized expertise and significant financial investment. Prevention is not sufficient to give you a deep view of your IT environment that uncovers potential cyber security threats and other possible problems. Cyber security is a major concern for networked devices in the Internet of Things (IoT) and Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) era for organizations.
Step 3: Dive deeper cyber security detection and response
It is very important to remember that no one has ever designed an entirely invulnerable system to cyber security. Cyber security revolves around a layer security approach to ensure there are multiple levels. The only thing you can do is minimize their impact on your business if you still cannot prevent every cyber threat from happening. The first step is to ensure you have the right processes and technologies to detect a potential cyber security threat. It is also crucial to be able to proactively respond to cyber threats and do whatever you can to mitigate them.
When a cybercriminal threatens to take your data through ransomware or data leak, it is a good practice to act as though you have less than two hours between when the infection occurred and the time when they can take it. Therefore, you must proactively monitor your systems all the time, ideally using both automated tools and human touch.
Cybersecurity for Small and Medium Businesses (SMB)
The challenges outlined above mean that many small and medium businesses (SMB) remain on the front line of the cybersecurity fight today and the best cyber security approach for any business. Small and medium businesses (SMB) are easy targets for cybercriminals as it takes too much time and effort to try to penetrate a enterprise organizations with larger cyber security budgets, tools, IT departments, and staff.
A small organization tends to have trouble addressing security holistically as well as proactive. It is possible that they might not even have a chief security officer, but instead have one or two employees responsible for all aspects of IT and other business directives, leading to a largely reactive security posture.
365 iT SOLUTIONS is federally certified by the Canadian federal government under the CyberSecure Canada program.
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