By the Numbers: Why Small Businesses Have to Prioritize Cybersecurity

High-profile cyber-attacks on big corporations make headlines, but the most devastating attacks are those few people know happened.

While big companies can survive attacks using their massive financial and legal resources, many small businesses don’t end up being as fortunate.

Perhaps that’s why attackers are so eager to target small and medium-size businesses (SMBs), and why each new global crisis gives rise to a new round of attacks using scare tactics pulled straight from the headlines.

This infographic walks through the risk small businesses face and demonstrates how devastating an attack can be to a small organization’s very chance of survival. It also reveals one critical step small businesses can take to protect themselves.

Attackers Target Small Businesses

• Owners of small businesses are more likely to pay ransoms to perpetrators of ransomware attacks than leaders of larger businesses are.
• 58% of malware victims are small businesses
• 50% of all cyber-attacks are committed against small businesses.

Limited Resources Make Small Businesses Vulnerable

• 47% say they have no understanding of how to protect their companies against cyber attacks.
• 72% said that malware-essentially files that launch attacks- has slipped past their systems for intrusion detection.
• The biggest challenge for 55% of small businesses in developing a cybersecurity plan is lack of resources and knowledge.

Cyber-Attacks Frequently Shut Down Small Businesses

• 40% of small-business attack victims experience more than 8 hours of downtime.
• The Better Business Bureau estimates that only 35% of small businesses could continue to operate profitably for three months or longer if they permanently lost data due to an attack.
• And the bottom line… 6 in 10 companies that suffer a cyber-attack are out of business within six months.

Small Businesses Can Make Cybersecurity a Priority Even with Limited Resources

Obviously, antivirus systems are a must for all businesses, and there are other applications that can protect email and guard against attacks. But some attacks can fool even the best protection systems. The average time for detecting a cyber-intrusion is a whopping 146 days.

When small businesses move accounting and associated critical business applications to the cloud and trust the operation of their software environments to a cloud provider, they allow employees real-time access from anywhere and ensure that people can work from wherever they are.

But they do much more than that. They minimize the threat of attacks by turning security over to experts who can save them from disaster.

As cloud provider, Right Networks can actually detect threats that antivirus and other security systems don’t yet recognize and neutralize those threats without causing any downtime for the business. So, those eight hours or more of downtime that so many businesses suffer become a total nonevent when an attacker attempts to damage a business.

Moving accounting and business applications to the cloud enables small businesses to protect profitability, minimize threats and ultimately stay in business. It’s the first and most effective measure businesses should consider when prioritizing cybersecurity. And it can cost less than $2 per day.