Underestimating the importance of business cybersecurity and ignoring important protections is like leaving your front door unlocked, hoping nothing goes wrong. If your business falls victim to a breach, it won’t just be a tech breakdown – it could be a total disaster for your business.
From legal fines and cleanup costs to a tarnished brand reputation, the impact of weak business cybersecurity can cost more than you think.
Lack of security can cause financial loss
If you get hit by a breach, the immediate cost of lost sales and productivity will only be the beginning. Security breaches often result in a series of major expenses, including:
- Regulatory fines. Your largest financial loss will come from regulatory fines that can range from hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars.
- Incident response/remediation. Expenses like forensic investigations, IT overtime, legal fees, and consulting services to get back up and running can cause the total cost, including regulatory fines, to reach $4.88 million.
- Ransom payments. The average ransomware demand is now over $5 million. It’s never a good idea to pay a ransom, but many business owners feel they have no choice.
- Lost customer trust. Once customers learn your business was breached, many will hesitate to do business with you, and some will start leaving you bad reviews online.
- Concerned investors. Breached businesses lose investor confidence, and stocks sometimes take a dip after an incident.
- Operational downtime. Breaches tend to disrupt operations long-term. The average business takes 258 days to locate and contain a breach. While it takes about three-quarters of that time to discover the breach, by the time a breach is contained, you’re looking at weeks, if not a couple of months of lost productivity.
Although these expenses are intimidating, the good news is that most financial losses can be prevented. With a strong business cybersecurity strategy that includes a backup and recovery plan, you can avoid regulatory fines, minimize downtime, and you won’t even need to consider paying a ransom.
One security incident can harm your reputation
Almost everyone remembers the big target data breach that happened in 2013 when hackers stole around 40 million credit and debit card numbers. Even though the issue was addressed years ago, there are people to this day who refuse to shop at Target. This incident demonstrates how one small mistake, even when fixed, can tarnish your brand reputation. Customers expect businesses to implement security from the start.
How to protect yourself from business cybersecurity incidents
Although business cybersecurity involves a complex series of systems, there are key components to a strong protection strategy that you can’t afford to skip.
1. Create a backup and recovery plan
Businesses that have a backup and recovery plan don’t have to bat an eye after a ransomware attack. They can abandon the compromised machines, ignore the ransom request, and start rebuilding and restoring important data.
To secure your business like this, implement daily automated backups with redundancies. Manual backups are too risky. Keep at least one backup offline at all times to prevent it from becoming infected. Backups are your only defense against ransomware attacks. However, backups commonly fail during recovery attempts due to corrupted files, so make sure you test the ability to recover the data you save.
2. Encrypt sensitive data
If you collect any type of personal data from people (leads, customers, or clients), make sure it’s encrypted wherever it’s stored, processed, or transferred, even temporarily. Never allow data to exist on a cloud server unencrypted. That’s precisely how so many SMBs get attacked and end up having to pay hefty regulatory fines.
Unencrypted data, when stolen, can be used by hackers with malicious intentions to commit fraud and/or identity theft. However, encrypted data can’t be read, so when it gets stolen, it’s useless. Regulatory agencies usually don’t fine businesses (or even require reporting) when a data breach involves encrypted data. This makes encryption your best line of defense against cybercrime.
3. Hire a business cybersecurity professional
Don’t underestimate the benefits of hiring a professional cybersecurity consultant. The stakes are too high to risk doing everything on your own while hoping it works out. One minor mistake – including a simple misconfiguration – can put your entire business at risk. Hiring a pro will protect your sensitive data, ensure business continuity, and give you peace of mind.
Prioritizing business cybersecurity is a requirement
Not protecting your business from cyber threats is a huge mistake. Even if you have enough capital to cover regulatory fines and recovery costs, it’s not an easy road to rebuild trust. Not only will you lose customers, but you may also struggle to keep your business staffed.
However, with a good strategy, secured backups, and professional expertise, you can protect your company’s assets, reputation, and future.
Photo by Sasun Bughdaryan; Unsplash
