In this era of fast-paced technological advancements, every company is moving towards the complete digitization of processes. From communication to the storage, organizations are turning to online for every bit of detail. This is why cyber-security is of paramount importance today!
The problem is that some companies, especially small businesses, think that cyber-security is a nice thing to have, but not a must-have in their daily activities.
If you think this way, check this out and see just how important cyber-security is in the workplace!
1. Cyber Threats Are Real
The first thing that business owners need to understand is that cyber threats are very real. Thus the need for a tight cyber-security is essential, especially for the small to mid-size organizations.
According to a report, 60% of cyber-attacks target medium to small businesses. Often assuming that they can’t be targeted, small businesses don’t implement cyber-securities and thus become an easy target for cyber-criminals. Cyber-criminals are aware that these organizations lack the experience, resources, and policies to fight them.
As a matter of fact, in another survey of 1,000 SMB owners, 85% admitted that they believed larger businesses were more targeted by hackers than they were. This explains why they continue to ignore cyber-security.
2. Protection From Competitors and Employees
Cyber-security can help you secure your most important data not only from cyber-criminals but also from competitors. For instance, if an employee leaves your business and joins your competitor, then they might try to take intellectual properties from your company along with them.
In order to avoid this, you can enhance your cyber-security and implement strict IT policies, configurations, and software. You should know that even if you’re enforcing a non-disclosure agreement, having these kinds of cyber-security components in place can help supply proof when or if malicious activities have occurred.
3. Save Money
The damages after a breach can be detrimental and expensive for businesses. Therefore, the benefits of investing in cyber-security outweigh the cost of a cyber-related incident.
Here are a number of factors that influence the total costs caused by a cyber-incident:
- OPERATIONAL COSTS: Security incident can disrupt, delay, or worse, shut down your business. For the retail businesses, this could mean that you suffer from sales losses, whereas a service company can have trouble providing good customer support.
- AFTERMATH: A cyber-related incident means that there is poor to no security implemented. This means that the company will have to focus on investments in money, people and time. You will need to buy or replace some software or hardware, invest or hire in more experts and more.
- FINES: According to the EU GDPR legislation, the DPA will establish whether or not your business took enough action in order to prevent cyber breaches. And if the outcome is negative, then your company can be fined.
- REPUTATIONAL DAMAGE: After a breach, people will hesitate and no longer want to buy your products or even use your services. So not only your brand reputation is damaged, but your profits, turnover and share price are at risk.
- LAWSUITS: Intellectual property theft, personally identifiable information theft and comprised client data can bring rise to expensive lawsuits.
4. Good PR
Not having a good cyber-security framework can also kill good public relations. Just think about how others, especially consumers, would see your lack of care for their data. In order to have a strong public relations, you need to show your clients just how seriously you take data security.
And in case your competitor’s clients start leaving them because of disastrous breaches on their end, you’ll be ready for them, showing the disappointed clients how you are different in terms of taking care of their data.
5. Productivity
Cyber-security is somewhat a form of business continuity. This provides you an advantage in terms of production. You can prepare for hackers and breaches with fail-safes, such as image-based backups, in order to set your business up for disaster recovery as well as misbehaving employees.
