In business there are two ways to learn; direct or indirect experience. When it comes to security, the clear winner should always be indirect experience. You don’t want to be that person whose heart suddenly lurches at the slowly dawning realisation something bad has happened and it happened on your watch. That’s the just way that security is – you don’t know you need it until it’s too late. And when you lose in security, you lose BIG. Compromised information and lost man hours are just the beginning when you have to start accounting for the true cost of a breach.
The worst part; it’s unfair. All the excuses in the world won’t count for a damn when you’re trying to explain to your executive team how you allowed this to happen. It won’t matter that the exec team never supported your initiatives, just as it won’t matter that they’ve never thanked you for the thousands of uninterrupted hours of service availability. You’ll be judged by a single disastrous moment. There’s an adage about a man whom led a virtuous life but in a moment of heated passion became violent and was forever known as a violent man. That’s just the way it is; a lifetime of good deeds shoved aside because of a single disastrous and defining day.
With that in mind, here are the top 5 reasons why any business needs to consider upgrading security to Fire Wall as a Service (FWaaS) –
1. It’s not just about losing data
Losing data is a bummer. It sucks, and you might even think that you can recover it. However, that is often the least of your problems. In an age of notifiable data breaches the resulting damage to your reputation can be irreparable. Every organisation has information they don’t want to share and IP they’d rather remain private, otherwise why wouldn’t they have made it public in the first instance?
2. You can’t take a part-time approach to a full-time problem
FWaaS provides 24/7 protection to your business whilst giving you access to certified security engineers whose function is to protect and inform our customers. We’ve taken a different approach to security management which focuses on maintaining the integrity of your environment by approving each change you make and walking it through with you where it makes sense. We take care of security, so you don’t have to.
3. Safety in obscurity is a lie
43% of business experienced a data breach in 2017 according to an IBM survey. That’s a big number and it’s growing as the surface attack area of businesses and people expand. Look to your left then look to your right, if either of those businesses haven’t suffered a breach then you may just be the odd one out.
4. Small doesn’t mean invisible, it means soft
Hackers are smart, they’re targeting small businesses and holding them to ransom with an amount that sits nicely between what they can afford and the cost of a third party removing the threat. On average, attackers can extract several thousand dollars from a small business without ever breaking a sweat. These unsavoury sorts realised that there were different markets to attack with smaller organisations having a softer and easier- to- access underbelly.
5. Breaches cause failures… of businesses
If you really want to understand a problem, look to where people put their money. A little known fact is that the cyber security insurance market has been growing at an incredible rate because of increasing security incidents. How many businesses could claim that losing core IP wouldn’t stop them in their tracks? That their customers would forgive them if their personal information was disclosed? Truth is businesses are fragile and it doesn’t take much to upset the apple cart.
Ultimately you need to remember what security is; insurance against a really bad day and when you consider the facts you’ll also see that it isn’t as uncommon as it once was. It isn’t nice and it’s not fair but it is what it is. You can only deal with what is and accept that the new era we’re in demands a rigorous defence.
Businesses have enough challenges without creating new ones and when it comes to security, you’re in no better hands than ours. We live and breathe this security so that you’ll never have to know the pain that comes from learning what a real bad day feels like.
