If you haven’t done your business security audit yet, do it now!

It seems that one of the nastier, unforeseen results of recent pandemic is the widespread of cybercrime. Can you afford to lose money now? Can you afford another business interruption, caused, this time, by a cybercrime disease? That is why you need to get educated about online security and establish proper security procedures in our businesses.

With Canada holding the 2nd place in the world for cybercrime attacks, it is imperative that small and micro businesses take action to protect themselves from online threats. One cannot assume anymore that their business is too small to be affected. The ever-prevalent phishing scams gather information about all of us, from all sorts of internet sources. This information then is used to either get into your financial information and steal money from your accounts, or for ransomware attacks on your company. It is not a matter of “if” anymore, but “when” such problem will affect your company.

It is very important to do a security audit now, before it is too late, and you lose your company. Statistics show that 60% of small businesses affected by cybercrime close within 6 months from the attack. There are several factors causing such drastic results of cyber-attacks. Privacy laws make you responsible for client information stored by you. Not only you might have to notify all your clients of the attack, but you also must, apparently, provide a year of your clients’ data monitoring. It is not a small expense. Imagine keeping record of 100 clients and having to spend $50 per month per client for 12 months. Your cost is $5000 per month, reaching $60,000 a year. Now, if you have 300 clients’ information, that changes into $15,000 a month and $180,000 a year and so on and so forth… And this is only a fraction of the cost. Any cyberattack causes business interruption. Affected data must be recovered and secured as quickly as possible and with urgency, quite often, comes cost increase. You still must pay your employees, even if they are unable to work. There is a loss of business coming from inability to timely fulfill your obligations during this time and there is a cost of losing future business, because of the lack of trust from potential business partners. Data shows significant impact of this part of the cyber-attack fallout on affected companies.

What if you have cyber insurance? Recently more and more insurance companies require security policies to be implemented and signed off on before they’ll provide you with such insurance. The older policies can be void if the IT component of your security has been neglected and you end up paying all the costs of cyber-attack from your own pocket. Can you afford it without this impacting your business, already weakened due to pandemic?

We all know that cost of prevention is always much lower than the fallout from any kind of disaster. That is why, if you have not done cyber security check on your company recently (within at least a year) do it now. There are companies that specialize in such audits and will point out all the holes that need to be patched to increase your online safety. The costs of such audits are negligible in comparison (just consider above cost of data protection) and I highly recommend doing it.

I am sure you have a lot of questions regarding this, so please book a free consultation now.

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