You’re not Sony – but you are still at risk

When the media is full to brimming with stories about the consequences of Sony Entertainment being hacked in the most public and embarrassing way, it’s easy for the owners and managers of small firms to believe they are way off the radar of cyber criminals.

But the sad reality is that SMEs are more likely to be targeted than multinational corporations who can call on many lines of defence and expertise.

Smaller firms very often don’t have the budget to keep computer security specialists on staff and it wouldn’t be cost effective to do so. It’s also easy to put your head in the sand and convince yourself it won’t happen to you because you’re not big enough to be noticed. Of course, by the same token, attackers can make the assumption that you haven’t gone far enough to protect yourself, thus making you worth having a crack at.

You don’t have to be a massive business to still have an accumulation of valuable data. Even your contact databases can have a value to a fraudster. And if you serve bigger clients, you could become a vector for hackers to attack them. That’s something you really don’t want!

Regularly we see surveys suggesting that the majority of smaller firms don’t consider cyber security a top priority because it hasn’t caused them a problem. Though, if you do not use sensitive intrusion detection services and systems, you wouldn’t necessarily even know you had been the subject of an attack…

When it does happen, the repercussions are often devastating. Figures have suggested that far more than half of firms that do suffer an attack on their IT end up closing down within six months of the event. Nobody wants that to be them.

The chances of suffering this fate diminish exponentially when you start by getting the basics of IT security right. Put some key products and hardware in place and then ensure it is regularly managed and maintained and don’t forget that staff training and proper protocols are an important part of the process too. While this can sound daunting, it really doesn’t have to be when you have a good partner managing it for you. There’s no need to hire a cyber defender of your own (would you even know who is the genuine article to recruit?!) when you can buy in these services at a fraction of the price.

When expert advice and support, backed by systematic management of services can be built into your business for thoroughly reasonable costs it very quickly becomes a simple equation of whether you can afford not to… All of the issues raised above are things we are experienced in implementing at Bespoke Computing. If you’d like to know more, we’re happy to chat further.