If you’ve never been hacked before, you might think, “Come on, would hackers really target me or my business?” And the answer is yes they would. Data shows that cyber attacks are extremely common and can happen to any business or website. These attacks result in huge monetary losses more often than not, but having the right security measures in place can go a long way to not only minimize the damage of a successful attack but also deter attackers in the first place.
Below, our San Marcos managed IT service experts take a deeper look into the many reasons why full stack cyber security is essential for any business in today’s age where serious cyber attacks are more common than ever.
1) Costly Attacks Can Happen to Any Business
Understanding the Scale of Cyber Attacks
According to Cybint Solutions, up to 57% of businesses will be targeted at some point with a hack, 62% with phishing and social engineering attacks, and 51% with direct denial of service attacks. And more than that, if you have a website, almost every single website that is listed on Google will have at least attempts made to crack the admin password. Even if this is not a full blown attack, it shows the sheer scale of hacks that currently exist.
Understanding the Costs of a Successful Attack
Up to 43% of businesses were the victim of a successful breach within the last year. When it comes to small and medium sized businesses, the average successful data breach will cost 2.2 million dollars. And while this is an average figure, and some cost significantly less and some cost tens of millions, the cost of each breached record can cost a company up to $300 in lost clients, restitution, data security cleanup and more, both according to IBM.
2) Security Measures Make a Real Difference
Minimizing the Damage of an Attack
With all of these negative factors, what can your business do? An IBM report also looked at the cost of all businesses that were hacked, and the average hack resulted in losses of more than $5.2 million. With a response team in place and encryption set up by a cyber security firm, however, these losses were reduced by nearly $720,000. And by having automated security technologies set up by a team (think AI that defends and scans for hacks and runs automated penetration tests) you can more than half the cost of a data breach to $2.6 million, combined with the savings from having a team in place can lead to severely decreased costs, should a breach be successful.
Deterring Attackers in the First Place
Most hackers are hackers of opportunity. Once they see that your systems are well defended, they will generally decide that it is not worth the effort. So besides the fact that any breaches would be far less likely to be fatal to your business, they are also far less likely and can lead to you not having to deal with it at all in the first place.
3) Many Threats Are Internal
Understanding the Vulnerabilities
Finally, sometimes the largest threats are actually things that exist in your company already. These include things such as unsecured routers, employees with bad tech hygiene, bad systems in place for sharing and exporting data, lack of encryption, out of date software and more. Since all it takes is one of your software or hardware providers to be hacked (say, a manufacturing automation, a point of sales system or a medical billing software), one small vulnerability can potentially lead to catastrophic results when exploited.
Addressing the Vulnerabilities
Having a full-stack company come in will allow the weakest points of entry to be detected and will ensure that it does not get exploited. By having a network that automatically scans for what default traffic looks like, you can detect if a piece of software has become breached and can prevent anything disastrous from happening to your network in the first place.
Find Managed IT COMPANY Services in San Marcos TX
If you own a business in Central Texas or the Austin area, it’s important to have a full-stack company with a local base who can send technicians on-site as needed. Located in San Marcos, the managed IT services team at tekRESCUE is always ready to help secure businesses of all sizes in the Central Texas area. Contact us today to learn how we can help improve your business’ cyber security.
