It’s predicted that by 2021, cybercrime will cost the world $6 trillion annually. That’s double the $3 trillion tab cybercrime racked up in 2015. Ransomware damage costs alone are on track to hit $11.5 billion in 2019, at which point it’s estimated that a business will fall victim to a ransomware attack every 14 seconds.
Regardless of the size of your business, cybercrime can be very costly in regards to lost productivity, damage and destruction of data, forensic investigation, embezzlement, stolen money, theft of intellectual property and financial and personal data, fraud, downtime, restoration and deletion of hacked data and systems, and reputational damage.
Small businesses have a tendency to be overextended and budget weary and recent data indicates that small businesses actually suffer the most from cyberattacks. Yes, attacks on large companies are what we read about in the headlines but an abundance of smaller-scale attacks are creating havoc for SMB's on a daily basis. Smaller companies are a greater risk than larger organizations because their business might not survive the aftermath..
According to the Ponemon Institute's 2017 State of Cybersecurity in Small & Medium-Sized Businesses report, the percentage of small businesses that have experienced a cyberattack in the past 12 months is up from 55% in 2016 to 61% in 2017.
The Verizon 2018 Data Breach Investigations Report disclosed that 58% of malware attack victims are categorized as small businesses.
Stay Ahead of the Game
There is no better time than the present to start protecting you and your business from a cyberattack. With more SMBs victims and increasingly powerful cyberattacks developed daily, there is too much at stake. It is too expensive to allow your mission-critical data to be held hostage.
Many smaller businesses have an inconsistent approach to cybersecurity due to budgetary allowances, growth, lack of standardized practices, and disparate systems. Cybercriminals will take advantage of any vulnerability, human error or gap in strategy and planning. A proactive cybersecurity system should be your first line of defense.
Cybersecurity is the practice of protecting the integrity, confidentiality and availability of information. In practice, this can be an overwhelming task. Many small business owners do not have the time, experience or technical knowledge to protect their company from cyberthreats. Employing a cybersecurity company will allow you to implement a proactive cybersecurity system. The cybersecurity company ISTEC encourages organizations take a holistic approach that incorporates training, people, processes, and technology to protect and defend.
A good cybersecurity system can closely monitor your networks and systems and alert you to any suspicious activity. But a cybersecurity system is not only the protection of critical infrastructure and network, cloud, application and IoT security. A proactive system includes employee security training, organization-wide mandates and standards, and weakness or security gap assessments. The importance of security standards must be communicated to every member of your team.
Have a Backup Plan
Business continuity and disaster recovery planning are equally as critical to cybersecurity as network security. The only way to protect your organization’s data from a cyberattack is to have a reliable backup solution performing frequent backups (continuous data protection) that are regularly tested. SEP VM Essentials is a complete backup and disaster recovery solution designed to meet the needs of small businesses. By implementing a business continuity strategy utilizing secure data backup and Bare Metal Recovery software, entire physical and virtual servers, operating systems, databases, and applications quickly and easily be restored. SEP can provide expert assistance creating a thorough backup and disaster recovery strategy for any size environment to eliminate the possibility of data loss and blackmail in the event of a cyberattack.
