The Top SMB Security Risks

Here are the top small business risks and what you should do now:

Home Sweet (Insecure) Home

During the pandemic, you had to support the migration from work locations to home-based access for your employees very quickly. There was no time to consider if the home Wi-Fi was secured, or if the network they are using is shared with the kids and neighbors who surf everywhere and can intercept communications. Of course, you trust your employees, but you have no way of enforcing reasonable security since you have no budget, time or expertise to deploy all the protections you should have.

Laptops

As above, you probably rushed to support remote workers and you may have thought that you were saving money by allowing your employees to use their laptops to access your business. What the statistics prove out is this is not the best financial, or most secure decision. BYOD Laptops may be shared with other household members and the OS may not be patched. Furthermore, the business owner has no way to enforce security policies such as preventing exposure of company secrets, preventing private docs from being shared, preventing corporate password reuse, or preventing an employee from clicking on a malicious www URL.

Cell Phones

As with laptops, your employees want convenience AND no one wants to carry two phones. What is a small company owner to do? With Check Point, the world’s best cell phone security tool and Mobile Device Manager (MDM) is within your budget. Fast, easy deployment, complete features and full policy enforcement are available.

Email and Cloud-Based Apps

This is still one of the leading vectors of compromises and must be addressed fully as the costs of compromise are ridiculous. Most small businesses have outsourced their email to one of the leading SaaS providers like Office 365 or Google, as they are cheaper, feature-rich, easier to manage, and have great availability and uptime. But, there is a dirty little secret: The current provider tools and typical Mail Gateway protection tools are no longer good enough to prevent threats from being delivered into your user’s inbox. You can spend money on training your users, but you can’t depend on your employees to be your last line of defense.

Servers in co-lo or broom closet

As a small business, you make the best decisions you can at the moment. You may have decided to buy a server(s) that could be compromised…and it needs care and feeding daily: keeping up with patching, monitoring the host-based intrusion prevention, and implementing and enforcing least privilege and Active Directory Management. Quantum Spark not only has a cool name, but is easy to deploy and manage with out-of-the-box Zero-Touch provisioning and a user-friendly mobile app for threat mitigation on the go. Quantum Spark is the “all in one” solution SMBs need that combine security and optimized internet connectivity; Wi-Fi, GbE, VDSL, & 4G LTE, performance-based routing.

HOW SMALL BUSINESSES CAN HAVE ENTERPRISE-GRADE SECURITY 7 WITHOUT AN ENTERPRISE BUDGET

Running a small business requires dealing with an immense number of issues from competition to scheduling, payroll, banking, and collections and the new one: supply chain issues. However, once you add security challenges to all of the above, it is just too much to handle: No Security Experts on staff, having to monitor security issues 24/7, compliance reporting requirements, and the desire and goal to have security as a competitive differentiator. Small business owners need help…and getting. Enterprise-Grade Security for your small business is just a click away.

Louis Lyons
MBA-ISM, CISSP, PMP, CCSK-TTT, MCSE
Chief Executive Officer
Shadow Rabbit Cyber LLC.
Plain City, OH
P: 614.401.8644
E: llyons@shadowrabbitcyber.com
L: http://www.linkedin.com/company/shadowrabbitcyber
W: www.shadowrabbitcyber.com

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