You might think that cybercriminals only target big businesses, but any company can be a target. Attacks on big business get the most media attention, but cybersecurity is crucial to companies of all sizes. The reality is that small businesses can be even bigger targets, as cybercriminals often see them as easy marks with lower levels of protection.
Even the smallest organizations can possess valuable data such as customer transaction records and intellectual property — a jackpot for cybercriminals and other bad actors.
Small businesses require protection just like larger organizations, but this protection needs to work within the confines of more limited resources and budgets.
In this shared blog, we’ll take a closer look at the current state of small business security, along with an introduction to our partner Cisco Umbrella – a cloud native security service, that can help protect your organization.
Small business cybersecurity isn’t easy to get right
While your business may have a cybersecurity budget that is a fraction of larger organizations, spending that money wisely can help you sleep at night.
Most people would agree that the internet has made life easier for consumers and business owners — especially in the extraordinary circumstances seen in 2020 and 2021 so far. With the increase in online services, cyberthreats are becoming more numerous and complex with orchestrated, multi-staged, evasive attacks becoming the norm.
Here’s some stats: the number of small and medium-sized businesses that go out of business within six months of a cyberattack is as high as 60%, according to the National Cyber Security Alliance.
Their research also found that over 70% of cyber attackers deliberately target small businesses, and almost half of small businesses have already experienced a cyber-attack. Meanwhile, 47% of small businesses say they have no understanding of how to protect themselves against cyberattacks.
You can’t afford to wait – but where do you start?
4 key security challenges facing small business
The rise of SaaS apps
Employees take advantage of cloud-based SaaS applications to work smarter, faster, and better. However, the majority of these apps are unsanctioned by IT departments or business owners. Left alone, this “shadow IT” often has security gaps, leaving your business open to threats and cybercriminals.
An increase in roaming, remote, and branch workers
Small businesses are beginning to work with an ever-expanding network perimeter. Employees now work on the go and in various branch and remote locations, all of which still need to be secured from threats — no easy task using a traditional security service.
Increasingly outdated infrastructure
The threats are growing and evolving like never before, increasing the strain on small business security. These threats now include everything from phishing to ransomware to malicious cryptomining, each of which needs to be addressed with robust, up-to-date protection.
Limited budget and resources
Small businesses have the same security needs as larger enterprises, but often lack the resources to deliver that security. It’s difficult to make room in tight budgets for new security products — and for the training teams to monitor and remediate threats.
Introducing Cisco Umbrella
You have enough to do running your small business. Cisco Umbrella takes the burden of security off your back, providing powerful, perimeter‐wide protection that’s easy to deploy and manage.
Cisco Umbrella unifies a variety of other security services for protection that goes even deeper than DNS. This includes a secure web gateway, cloud‐delivered firewall, firewall-as-a-service, threat intelligence, and CASB (Cloud Access Security Broker) functionality.
A single unified security service reduces the complexity of monitoring and managing threats and alerts, so your team can do more with less. Plus, fewer attacks and infections overall mean less remediation time, less downtime, and less of the costs associated with each.
The internet can be a very dangerous place, especially for small businesses – Cisco Umbrella can help provide you the protection you and your business deserve.
Let activereach and Cisco Umbrella help your business today. Sign up for a Free 21 Day Trial or contact us for more information here
This blog was written and originally posted by Andrea Gross on the Cisco Umbrella website, July 13, 2021
