The cyber threats are not just a problem for big tech organizations and governments. SMBs can be targeted too. Research reveals that 22% of small businesses have been the targets of various kinds of cyber-attacks. Nearly 11% of these attacks occurred during the last few years as per the study by the Better Business Bureau.
The Cyber Security Breaches Survey tells shocking truth that 43% of all the UK businesses had reported cybersecurity attacks or breaches in the last twelve months. All these data breaches have resulted in lost files, software, system, or even website corruption, or loss of valuable assets.
The most common cybersecurity threat involves scammers penetrating a business, sending fake emails, malware, and viruses. The same research also found that the average financial impact for activities during the last 12 months came at the cost of more than £3,000, which has a significant effect on the revenue of small businesses.
Without any doubt, the cybersecurity industry has grown considerably more than a decade due to the spread of high-profile cybercrime. Gartner reports that worldwide spending on cybersecurity is predicted to reach $133.7 billion in 2022. Viewing cybersecurity as an essential step to reduce cyber risks leaves excellent opportunity on the table. The organizational leaders need to witness cybersecurity as a business enabler that can increase their growth.
Over time, the cybersecurity firm has improved and is now capable of combating cyber-threats, and attacks boost their industry. In this post, we’ll be discussing different ways by which cybersecurity is helping the business to grow.
1. Protecting Valuable Assets
In a digitalized world, it is essential to secure and protect sensitive assets. For this reason, companies and government agencies allocate resources for cybersecurity. Everything comes into the play- from user and device certificate provisioning, mobile device management, multi-factor authentication, privileged account management, role-based access control, enterprise, and cloud identity management.
Allotting strong identities to users and non-persons entities while securing your data at rest in transit is vital towards a healthy cybersecurity posture. Either it is cloud-based or in-house, using a critical public infrastructure with comprehensive and well-defined policies and practices helps institutions to accomplish this task.
2. Enabling Mobile Employees
In the world of increased mobility, focusing on the security of Pcs is outdated. The mobile workforce is a new norm now, allowing higher levels of productivity while expanding your workforce geographically is crucial for both innovation and growth.
In empowering mobile employees, organizations do face new challenges like vetting mobile users, implementing digital certificates, and deploying the appropriate mobile security technology, tools, and policies.
Improvement requires flexibility, and flexibility needs mobility. Having a robust cybersecurity environment behind your mobile infrastructure is critical to avoid risks while permitting and improving growth.
3. Revolutionizing IT Infrastructure
Now more enterprises are migrating to the cloud to support companies and mobile workers and also to allow seamless and stronger collaboration. The hosted cloud environments offer significant advantages for employee collaboration and access to data from any location, which in turn assists organizations to grow. Migrating to the cloud can bring significant savings as firms don’t have to maintain and reform the IT infrastructure required for an on-premises environment.
Cloud migrations are troubled with cybersecurity issues, i.e., data breaches, denial of service, management of remote identities, unsafe external applications, and more that can obstruct the adoption and deployment. To leverage the cloud to improve, organizations need professionals for internal and external resources to plan, design, and deploy secure cloud computing environments along with supporting policies.
4. Social Engineering Tactics
We all know, phishing is the process of fake attempts to gain an individual’s sensitive information to compromise the data, and it ranges from accessing emails through bank accounts. However, with the rise of AI, hackers no longer need to be personally involved in the process but can automate these attacks.
To make sure that a business doesn’t become a victim of a phishing attack, companies must avoid responding to any such email they found suspicious or which ask for their personal information. Moreover, companies should prevent posting too much of their personal information online as it creates an opportunity for the scammers and they can use this information to prove their legitimacy while contacting the business.
5. Ransomware Protection
Ransomware is another severe threat to the business organization. It is a type of malware that encrypts business data and is unlockable in exchange for a handsome amount of fee. Such attacks have risen in prominence with the prevalence of cloud services for storing data.
Businesses are shifting towards the use of the cloud to store their data. But, there seems to be a misconception that storing data in the cloud is safer and secure than the system’s hard drive. To protect against attacks from ransomware, businesses must ensure that valuable data is backed up in various places. It shouldn’t be limited to cloud services, but locally and on a portable hard drive too.
As malicious software is continually developing, security software is adapting to cope with these threats. For this reason, the business must keep an updated version of the antivirus software. Secondly, the cybersecurity experts have expanded the use of VPNs and have now introduced VPNs for cloud services as well. Use such VPNs and protect your business. There are various ways to combat cyber risks and one such is through the use of VPNs. But, selecting a VPN is not an easy task. It is recommended to first go through the comparison of different VPN providers and then make the decision.
6. Data Leak Protection
The most epidemic threat to cybersecurity is data leaks that can be extremely damaging to either an individual or a business. All businesses have a wide range of data from client insight to employee data that consists of sensitive information that can easily be put at risk if the organization doesn’t take steps of prevention.
The best way businesses can do to protect their data from any leaks is by restricting the amount of information available in the public domain. Cybersecurity has introduced ways by which companies can reduce their own risk of exposure and can excel in growth.
7. Enforcing Formal Security Policies
Implementing security policies is imperative for locking down your system. Protecting the network must be everyone’s priority because it can become a potential gateway for attackers. Holding regular meetings and weekly seminars on cybersecurity practices, like strong passwords, detecting and reporting suspicious emails, activating MFA, and clicking links or downloading attachments should be a regular practice.
Parting Words
To sum up, hackers are evolving by each passing day and are emerging with new techniques to steal personal and sensitive information. The only way to avoid it is to remain updated with every security mechanism. Despite taking all the practical measures and doing considerable investment in the best security systems, a single email attachment which contains virus can infect the entire LAN.
All business organizations, regardless of their size, must ensure everyone involved in the company is up to do with the latest cybersecurity methods for protecting data. The best way to do this is with regular training of workforce along with using a framework to work with goals and objectives to achieve a standard that ensures the risk of a data breach is minimal and can strengthen their business too.
Author Bio: Enthusiastic Cybersecurity Journalist, A creative team
leader, editor of privacycrypts.com.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/rebecca_jeames