Companies today heavily rely upon their technology, including their equipment, networks, and data. However, with the convenience, productivity, and efficiency technology offers, it also means opening themselves up to cyber risk. This isn’t to say SMBs shouldn’t invest in tech strategies to better position themselves to compete, but that they also must recognize and address the risks.
Cyber attacks have ballooned in recent years. What’s been a persistent issue for decades gets more complex year over year. However, SMBs can better protect themselves by taking the following proactive steps.
Perform Risk Assessments
It’s important to recognize that while businesses have access to innovative technologies, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, to gain a competitive advantage, cybercriminals also have these same opportunities. By performing a cyber risk assessment, you can help your SMB identify the risks associated with these and other potential issues that can cripple your business. This process also helps you to identify threats, vulnerabilities, the impact of threats, and recovery options.
Guarantee Cyber Compliance
Risk assessments are also an essential component of any effective cyber compliance program you want to pursue. This process ensures your company will meet all industry and regulatory requirements and standards, such as ISO27001 and SOC2, and it helps your organization commit to best practices, such as those outlined by The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), in securing your data and technology assets to avoid breaches and other cyber risks.
Invest in Cybersecurity Insurance
Cybersecurity insurance is designed to help your business mitigate losses if it suffers a cybersecurity incident. Loss or exposure of your data is going to be very costly, especially as government regulatory agencies, both domestic and international, come down hard on companies that haven’t put reasonable cybersecurity measures into place. Even those that have best practices can suffer massive losses and integrating cyber insurance as part of a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy can help you to offset losses and recoup some of the money your business will need to spend as it suffers the fallout of a cyber attack.
The bottom line, these days, it’s not “if” an SMB will be attacked, it is “when”, especially as ransomware attacks continue to grow exponentially. In 2021, globally, this singular avenue of attack cost the world $20 billion and is anticipated to rise to a whopping $265 billion by 2031. It’s critical that all SMBs invest in cybersecurity mitigation strategies to ensure both continuity and survival of a cyber attack. Statistics suggest that most small businesses do not recover from a cyber attack. Investing in mitigation strategies can help your company avoid becoming a statistic.
Trava can help
Encompassing these three elements will go a long way towards ensuring you maintain total cyber security compliance. Trava Security has the expertise and tools to help your company better protect itself. To learn more about how we can serve as your partner in complete cyber protection, contact us today to schedule a demo or learn more about our solutions.
