HPE works with SMBs to embed security across the entire organisation
It’s a scary digital world out there. All businesses and organisations face the same formidable and forbidding security threat landscape, including small to midsize businesses (SMBs). As any recent security survey can tell you, organisations at all scales face ever-increasing numbers, kinds, and degrees of threat, and an everwidening attack surface for bad actors to infiltrate.
According to Forrester’s 2020 State of Security Operations, 79% of businesses have experienced a security breach of some kind in the past 12 months, and data breaches remain a constant concern for all businesses. In addition, security teams and their employers face significant technology challenges, many emerging from complex or siloed tools that create inefficiencies and produce subpar security outcomes. The same study found that the current top five security threats by type include:
- Ransomware: rogue software that encrypts business data and systems that can’t be recovered without paying for decryption—with no guarantee of success
- Phishing: email-, web page-, or social media-supplied links that take unwary users to malicious sites where passwords and credentials get stolen (and more)
- Data leakage: illicit means whereby business data gets past organisational safeguards and into the wrong hands
- Hacking: technical and social engineering attacks on IT infrastructures that aim to gain control; deny access or service; and steal data, intellectual property, or money
- Insider threats: attacks from former or current employees, often disgruntled, who use insider skills and knowledge to go after business data, IP, or financial assets
Most organisations (83%, says Forrester) have 24/7 security coverage of some kind, but too often lack the right kinds of technology and staff to keep pace with the ever-growing number and severity of cyberattacks.
No Shortage of Security Trouble for SMBs
SMBs are particularly vulnerable to security woes, given low IT staffing levels where security expertise is either scarce or severely overstretched. In an environment where IT staff struggles to keep up, most SMBs find themselves forced to react to security alerts, rather than to proactively and pre-emptively manage threats and address potential vulnerabilities.
In fact, even a slow response time to a security attack or data breach can spell disaster for SMBs. Opportunity costs for lost business, combined with repair, recovery, and reporting (and potential follow-up audit) costs, and more, weigh heavily on the bottom line. To make a long and painful story short, good security may be expensive and resource-intensive, but the cost of going without or using substandard security can be much, much greater. It can even threaten business viability and survival.