As a responsible business owner, you’d never shout your bank details across a busy room. You’d never leave personal information out on a desk for anybody to see. You’d never invite a random stranger into the boardroom while you were having a confidential meeting about the most sensitive aspects of your business model. If you don’t have the right cybersecurity systems in your workplace, you could be unknowingly doing all those things to a virtual world full of cybercriminals. Here’s why you need to invest in cybersecurity for your business.
Leaving a trail
If you access the internet without any cybersecurity, you could be sharing information with a cybercriminal. Even pieces of information that seem insignificant at the time could help a criminal steal your identity. For example, sharing a status about your pet could then give hackers the ability to access your email account if one of your security questions is “what is the name of your pet”. Once they’ve gained access to your emails, they could then gain access to a wide range of personal and financial information.
Installing devices like VPNs can protect you from attacks such as these. The Virtual Private Network encrypts all of the information you enter into any website. This makes it impossible for your details to then be used in a malicious cyber-attack.
Never let your guard down
In the 21st century, it would be naive for anyone to think that all business is done between the hours of 9 to 5, Monday to Friday, from the desktop sitting in your office. Many big business decisions are now made by accessing emails or even sending relevant documents to our mobile devices. That’s why it’s just as important to protect yours and your colleagues’ mobile devices as it is your office computers.
Some security systems will now offer mobile devices the same level of protection as the computers that are physically plugged into the network. For example, the SonicWall SMA 100 Series is a security system with advanced authentication that offers web application protection for any device, anywhere, at any time. This means it can detect and protect from any threat to any member of staff’s device from anywhere in the world. With prices starting from just £370, this is a great investment for a business of any size.
The cost of a breach
If you fail to invest in cybersecurity, then the cost of making things right after any data breach would vastly outnumber the price tag of any security system. If you don’t protect customer data and it gets into the wrong hands, you could be facing a fine that could put your whole business at risk. For example, last year, Equifax was fined around $700 million after hackers accessed hundreds of thousands of personal details from their system. That doesn’t consider the damage the bad publicity will have on the business, which will probably result in hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue over the coming years.
Veeramachineni Lalitha
I am Finance Content Writer. I write Personal Finance, banking, investment, and insurance related content for top clients including Kotak Mahindra Bank, Edelweiss, ICICI BANK and IDFC FIRST Bank. My experience details : Linkedin