Cybersecurity Solutions for Small Businesses

There is a common misconception in today’s cybersecurity landscape that cybercriminals are focused solely on hacking large organizations and institutions. In reality, the opposite is true; they tend to target small and medium-sized businesses more so than their larger counterparts. Business owners in this sector need to stay vigilant and protect against potential security breaches. Thankfully, cybersecurity solutions are available for the protection of your business and can be tailored to support the unique needs of your organization.

Why Do Small Businesses Need Cybersecurity Services?

According to Verizon’s 2020 Data Breach Investigations Report, 43% of cyberattacks targeted small businesses. These types of organizations tend to have lax cybersecurity protections, which allows cybercriminals to sneak their way into their technology systems. As a result, small businesses become hacking victims, causing their sensitive data and information to be compromised. Inevitably, this impacts business operations and financial health, lowers morale, and may have a long-term impact on business goals. Implementing basic cybersecurity measures to protect your business is, therefore, necessary, and it’s a good idea to consider additional protection to proactively combat potential threats.

How Will Cybersecurity Help My Small Business?

Having cybersecurity measures in place is a fundamental first step. SysGen takes a three-pronged approach to a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy, emphasizing people, policy, and technology. These elements work simultaneously to form the comprehensive cybersecurity protection that your business needs. If your business implements the technology to safeguard your data and information but your team isn’t trained in recognizing phishing emails, the cybersecurity measures won’t work as effectively. It’s like locking the doors but leaving the windows open to let cybercriminals in.

Focusing on these three elements is your best defense against cybersecurity attacks. Training your team to be aware of potential threats is the first step. Implementing technology and policy would come next to optimize your business’s cybersecurity measures. With cybersecurity solutions in place, your business will be protected from external threats (such as phishing emails and calls), your reputation in the market remains intact, and you can save considerable time and costs. Overall, these benefits will enhance business operations, and in turn, you’ll be able to focus on achieving your business goals rather than putting out fires whenever there are hacking attempts.

Eliminates External Threats

A business with cybersecurity solutions in place will be less likely to fall victim to fraud attempts than one that has none. Spam filters can prevent your team from receiving phishing emails, reducing the likelihood that a malicious link is clicked on. Training your team on social engineering techniques raises awareness about how they can be used against a business and how to handle these types of messages if received. Understanding how hackers attack supply chain software can help your small business recognize the attempts and alert the cybersecurity team in your organization. While eliminating all external cyber threats isn’t realistic, your business has the power to prevent as many vulnerabilities as possible.

Protect Your Reputation

The reputation of your business is paramount. If your business is compromised by external threats like data breaches and ransomware, stakeholders might question the safety of their sensitive data in your possession, as well as the strategic planning capacity of your business. This, in turn, will harm your reputation and can lower the morale of your team. Protecting your reputation can be achieved by maintaining the quality and value of your services, not by putting out fires and paying astronomical costs caused by cyberattacks.

Save Time and Money

Cybersecurity solutions provide time and cost savings. Breaches cost businesses a significant amount of damage, and many organizations do not prioritize cybersecurity investments. However, if a cyberattack occurs, an organization reacts immediately, spending whatever it takes to get the business back up and running. When it comes to cybersecurity, spending saves more money. Investing in proper measures and connecting with the right cybersecurity experts can prevent your business from suffering long-term damages caused by malicious attacks.

How Does It Work?

Cybersecurity measures provide long-term benefits such as eliminating external threats, protecting the company’s reputation as well as time and cost savings. So, how do small business owners start? Through SysGen’s Managed Security services, our team of cybersecurity experts helps you get started.

Discovery

Understanding your business and IT environment is key. A team of cybersecurity experts conducts a vulnerability assessment to understand yours. This assessment involves searching for weaknesses within your network and IT ecosystem to ensure there are no immediate cyber threats. Depending on the results found in the first step, a penetration test may be necessary. This is where the SysGen team attempts to exploit the vulnerabilities found in the first assessment to see how well the current security systems hold. Once the pain points are confirmed, a cybersecurity strategy is developed and implemented, appropriately protecting your business.

Planning

After the assessment of the IT environment is complete, the planning stage starts. Using people, policy, and technology, cybersecurity experts can start planning a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy that can continually protect your small business. Your people are the first line of defence, which means they need to be aware of current cybersecurity threats and how to recognize them when attempts enter the systems in your business. Technology must stay updated to continually combat viruses, phishing emails, and other malicious attempts. Policies must be created to act as the organizational framework for appropriate security procedures within your business. SysGen’s cybersecurity experts can work with your team and provide templates and guidance for policy development so that they can be custom-built for your business needs. Having internal cybersecurity policies in place can help your team know what to do in the event that hacking attempts occur in the workplace.

Encrypting your business’ data at the beginning is vital. With this method of protection, your information is encoded and can only be accessed or decrypted by assigned users who have the correct key or password. This will alleviate immediate attempts of breaching. During this planning stage, your team can also work with SysGen’s team of cybersecurity experts to build a roadmap for strategic direction to achieve cybersecurity objectives and safeguard your business’ high-risk assets. While this stage of cybersecurity solutions implementation takes the longest, it is also the most important.

Implementation

Once the policy plan has been developed and implemented, SysGen’s team of cybersecurity experts can deploy technology that works for your small business. We work with organizations such as Microsoft to leverage cutting-edge technology to protect your business. While technology is not a silver bullet for your cybersecurity defense, it’s an integral piece of your security strategy. Technology can help you protect against viruses, malicious software, malware, phishing attempts, ransomware, spam, and other threats. A range of cloud-based software can protect user credentials, enforce robust authentication, and provide conditional access policies. As the business owner, you won’t need to worry about managing your logins and can ensure the right people have access to the appropriate resources.

Implementing multi-factor authentication (MFA) adds a layer of protection to the sign-in processes in your business. When accessing accounts or apps, your team can provide additional identity verification, such as scanning a fingerprint or entering a code received by text message. This extra layer of protection will safeguard your business’ data and sensitive information.

Training

Technology and policies can’t work on their own; people are the strongest line of defence. 80% of data breaches are caused by human error. According to this survey conducted by Malwarebytes, at least 20% of security breaches in organizations were caused by remote workers. That’s why SysGen’s cybersecurity experts provide educational tools for your team, including in-person training and online workshops for employees to understand how to identify and mitigate malicious attacks.

Our people at SysGen can provide on-demand cybersecurity training for employees who need to update their security knowledge to protect your organization. Working with cybersecurity experts will give you access to periodical security bulletins which helps raise awareness of current cybersecurity trends, so your team can be ready for potential threats.

Post-Support

After all cybersecurity measures are set up and operational within your small business, it doesn’t mean that we will leave you to it. SysGen’s cybersecurity experts will be available to provide cybersecurity maintenance and ongoing support. The world of cybersecurity is constantly changing, which is why everyone must stay up to date to help prevent cyber attacks from occurring in the first place. Post-support cybersecurity will look like periodical audits of current policies, updated security awareness training sessions, and top-notch technology implementation to enhance current cybersecurity solutions.

Cybersecurity Solutions