There are 10 benefits of implementing cybersecurity including:
- Driving more revenue.
- Protecting revenue.
- Training employees provides a safe working environment.
- Building client trust.
- Saving money.
- Meeting and maintaining compliance.
- Protecting against data leakage.
- Establishing a baseline for continuous monitoring.
- Maintaining uptime.
- Improving productivity.
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The Importance Of Cybersecurity
Digital adoption is complex and increases risk, but companies will continue to transform because adopting new technologies offers benefits to flexibility, productivity, and ultimately growth.
With that said, the benefits offered by the adoption of digital technology today can quickly be erased if cyber security is ignored. One clear example is how work-from-home allowed productivity to continue despite the COVID-19 pandemic.
However, work-from-home has also extended the small business network and increased the complexity of managing cyber security and securing business data.
This allows a business to focus on running and growing the business, while at the same time securing its networks which could potentially lead to increased revenue.
Recent cyber security statistics provide the strongest case for developing a cybersecurity program. Cybercrime has risen 600% since the COVID-19 pandemic began and ransomware – malicious code designed to exploit computer systems and hold filesystems hostage – is the predominant cyber threat.
Many ransomware attacks now include double extortion by demanding one ransom amount to regain access to encrypted files, and another to prevent the public release of stolen data.
Research shows that 43% of cyber attacks target small and medium-sized businesses.
Other evidence indicates specific threat actors that target small businesses; LockBit has been identified as the most active ransomware strain in 2022, however, the average ransom sum paid by the victim is only $85,000 compared to the almost $1 million average for all ransomware attacks combined.
Taking these facts into account, the situation is clear; small and mid-sized businesses are the most exploited type of enterprise in the cyber threat landscape today.
Why Small Businesses Are Most At Risk
Small business statistics related to cyber security preparedness further highlight why small businesses are facing an increasingly difficult situation:
- 83% of SMB’s haven’t allocated financial resources to recover from a cyber attack.
- 91% of small businesses don’t have cyber liability insurance coverage.
- 43% of SMBs haven’t implemented active cyber security plans.
- 52% of SMBs don’t have internal IT security expertise.
These statistics show that a majority of small businesses are unprepared to weather a cyber attack. But what are the underlying reasons behind the numbers?
There are many reasons, but here are the more important ones:
- A talent shortage makes it difficult to find cybersecurity talent.
- Cybersecurity is a complex subject and requires specialized skills and talent.
- An ad-hoc approach to cyber security is unlikely to offer much protection, and an organized approach demands intense planning and effort.
- Small businesses have a hard time justifying the costs of implementing a cybersecurity program.
In a nutshell, small businesses are most at risk because they are not properly prepared, and being properly prepared is no easy task.
Top Security Threats Facing Businesses
Social Engineering
The most common attack tactics used to gain initial access to a network are social engineering tactics such as phishing, spear-phishing, vishing, smishing, or USB key drops.
By collecting publicly available information about the target, an attacker can develop email messages or place phone calls attempting to get the intended target to open malicious web-links or download and install trojanized software.
Software Vulnerabilities
The second most common attack tactic that attackers use to gain initial access to a target network is to exploit known vulnerabilities or misconfigurations in public facing software applications.
These software apps may be an organization’s web-server, or services for remote access such as remote-desktop (RDP) or VPN connections.
To close the security gaps presented by public-facing software applications, organizations should incorporate a vulnerability management program into their greater cybersecurity program.
A proper vulnerability management program includes change management activities aimed at applying software updates promptly to close any known vulnerabilities and monitors systems to ensure that systems are properly configured.
Lack Of A Security Strategy
From an internal perspective, a small business does itself a great disservice by not planning and implementing a cyber security strategy.
Several factors can prevent a business from taking action, such as the following:
- A lack of understanding about how to approach the threat of cyber security.
- Not knowing about available resources such as IT industry standards, and best-practice frameworks,
- Lack of internal specialized knowledge and skills, and a fear of being overwhelmed by the challenge of understanding and planning a cyber security strategy.
Advantages Of Cybersecurity
Businesses are in the eye of the storm and many are not prepared to proactively handle a cyber attack. Businesses that want to ensure their operations are sustainable need to take mitigating action by preparing a cybersecurity strategy.
Planning and implementing a cybersecurity program need not be considered a cost center but rather an investment that can have long-term benefits to the business.
1. Drives More Revenue
Once your small business has an effective cybersecurity program in place you are ahead of the pack. Advertise it to your existing and potential clients as a form of assurance that you are resilient.
Furthermore, if your cyber security program includes the right compliance certifications, you are now qualified to compete for contracts that were previously unavailable.
These projects may include lucrative government and large enterprise contracts that formally require cyber security compliance to satisfy their risk requirements.
All of these things are opportunities to increase your bottom line and the ultimate takeaway is that cyber security compliance is increasingly the key you need to open the door.
2. Protects Your Reputation
Customers and partners put a lot of faith into a company when they choose to do business with it. For larger companies, data breaches were found to cause a significant drop in share prices, and the impact on small businesses can be even more detrimental to reputation.
For example, when IT management and security software company Kaseya experienced a ransomware attack their direct and downstream clients were all subjected to a supply chain software vulnerability, which resulted in widespread concern in the media, hurting Kaseya’s reputation.
In another recent example, Costa Rica suffered a data breach by the prolific ransomware group Conti.
Considering the importance of a national government’s ability to maintain public support and confidence in a government’s ability to protect its citizens. Even system downtime that causes service outages or failure to deliver products on time can hurt a business’s reputation.
Although managers can issue apologies and offer to compensate for losses, the fact remains that it was a failure, which in turn can cause customers may move on to greener pastures.
The bottom line is cyber breaches instill doubt in customers, damage a company’s reputation, and the impact can last indefinitely.
3. Trains Employees On Security Best Practices
The difference between taking an ad-hoc approach to cybersecurity and formalizing a cybersecurity program with qualified professionals is enormous.
Implementing industry standards and best practices across all of a business’s attack surfaces offers a strong measure of protection from cyber attacks and includes plans to minimize damage and fully recover if a successful attack does occur.
An ad-hoc approach leaves security gaps that can be easily spotted and exploited by a skilled attacker. Social engineering attacks are the number one entry vector that gives an attacker a foothold in the victim’s environment.
By educating staff about phishing, spear phishing, and vishing, a cybersecurity program reduces the chances of a successful attack on a small business by proactively providing the required knowledge and know-how.
4. Provides A Safe Working Environment For Your Employees
A complete cybersecurity program includes consideration for physical security controls.
Physical security controls provide essential security assurances by directly limiting who can access computer systems that hold sensitive information, and evidence about the identities of individuals who have accessed sensitive areas.
Physical controls include door locks, cabinet and drawer locks, security cables for computer systems themselves, and perhaps most importantly security surveillance camera systems.
Deploying these security devices on premises not only serves to protect against potential cyber security breaches, but acts as deterrence and evidence to other forms of unwanted behavior such as physical violence and intimidation, theft, and sexual harassment; providing employees with a safer and more cohesive working environment.
5. Builds Client Trust
Implementing a cybersecurity program can come with certified evidence that your company is taking a serious approach to risk management.
A typical cyber security program includes vulnerability scanning and may include penetration testing to verify that the implemented security controls are effectively enforcing strong security.
These processes produce reports that can be used to demonstrate to customers, clients, and partners that you are taking a proactive approach to cyber risk mitigation.
Furthermore, if your company’s cybersecurity program includes compliance certification, those successes should be communicated to build evidence-based trust.
6. Saves Money
The costs of a data breach are higher than they have ever been and higher than the costs of taking a proactive approach to cybersecurity.
When caught unprepared to deal with the repercussions of a cyber attack, small businesses must immediately seek costly support from 3rd party cybersecurity specialists.
Taking a proactive approach to cyber security, both the number of incidents and the negative impact of an incident is reduced.
Backups of systems, data, configurations, incident response, and disaster recovery plans enable a small business to quickly and routinely return to a secure and operational baseline, saving tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
7. Meets And Maintains Compliance
Compliance attestation lets customers, partners, and potential partners know that you are serious as an organization and ready to go the extra mile to ensure resilience.
From a broad perspective, cybersecurity compliance requires administrative, technical, and physical policies, controls, and standard operating procedures designed to ensure that strong measures are protecting a company’s assets and its customers’ data.
Any company is at risk of becoming a victim of a cyber attack. But those that have achieved a compliance certification through their cyber security program have evidence of taking proactive action to prevent becoming a victim and are ready to respond to and recover from an attack incurring minimal damages.
8. Protect Against Data Leakage
Although direct financial gain from ransomware is the primary goal of most cybercrime today, the second most sought after gain for criminals is access to an organization’s proprietary information through data leakage.
This may include sensitive information such as customer lists that may include names, email addresses, physical addresses and phone numbers, and personal or business information, or even proprietary R&D data, intellectual property, or trade secrets.
A data security strategy is designed to protect sensitive data from being stolen.
In the wrong hands, this information can give competitors an advantage, albeit an ill-gotten and unfair one.
A proper cyber security program will include a data loss prevention strategy aimed at securing all data with appropriate levels of encryption when at-rest, in-transit, and in-use, and early identification of data exfiltration to block attempts to steal proprietary sensitive information.
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9. Establishes A Baseline For Continuous Monitoring
Although a cyber security program consists of several components that function together to protect from all angles, one of the most key activities in a cybersecurity strategy is vulnerability management.
Vulnerability management is the process of actively seeking potential vulnerabilities that an attacker could use to compromise an organization’s assets, and remediating those vulnerabilities before they can be attacked.
Vulnerability management also includes continuous monitoring via the installation of IT security tools such as host or network-based intrusion detection systems (HIDS and NIDS) that can detect suspicious activity and push alerts to the security team.
More advanced host or network intrusion prevention systems (HIPS, and NIPS) can take automated action to disable the attack before it can achieve its goals.
The process of continuous monitoring also aims to reduce the dwell time for attacks that may have been partially successful or in an early-stage compromise to launch a second stage of attack.
10. Maintains System Uptime And Improves Productivity
When a business’s digital systems are unavailable there are a host of negative impacts on operations. System downtime contributes to loss of productivity, and wasted resources, and may cause a direct reduction in sales revenue if customer-facing services are unavailable.
The secondary impact can lead to a loss of reputation, and customer trust, causing further revenue losses.
A cybersecurity program is generally concerned with protecting all aspects of the “CIA Triad” (confidentiality, integrity, and availability) of data, and includes security controls that are specifically architected to provide uptime guarantees via vulnerability management, incident response plans, backup, and failover strategies, and disaster recovery plans.
The result is high-availability business operations that can be sustained indefinitely.
Wrapping Up
As the cybersecurity threat grows, businesses of all sizes need to respond by taking measures to reduce the potential impact that a cyber attack could have on their business operations.
Small businesses are most at risk because they are generally less prepared due to the complexity of the challenge.
However, although cybersecurity is a complex spectrum of specialized experience, knowledge, and skills, a high degree of confidence – even for small businesses – can be attained and sustained.
The best way to do this is by partnering with an experienced, professional, and proven Managed Security Service Provider (MSSP) to develop a customized cybersecurity program that addresses a business’s specific risks.
Also, although it may not be initially apparent on the first approach, a cybersecurity program does not necessarily have to be merely a cost that induces financial hardship upon a small business.
Understanding the benefits that a proactive cybersecurity approach can bestow can enable a small business to catapult itself forward with a competitive posture and mindset.
Going forward, the high costs that cyber-breaches have had on many companies will motivate organizations to increasingly seek partnerships with those who are aware and proactive in their cyber strategy.
This results in stronger risk assurances, increased trust, less operational downtime, and higher productivity, leading to a competitive edge, increased revenues, and in some cases even a knock-out blow by random demand, regulatory fines, or reputational damage resulting from a cyber breach.
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