Security isn't a one-time fix or a short-lived solution. It's an ongoing commitment for all small businessesโone requiring strong policy and even stronger solutions.
According to study conducted by the Ponemon Institute, 61 percent of small businesses experienced some kind of cyberattack in 2017. Cybercriminals target small firms because they are often easier to penetrate. As a result, the news is full of damaging reports about breaches, intrusions, and data theft for these easy targets.
Translating these incidents into actionable events poses both financial and implementation challenges for the typical small business owner. Damage control and recovery require careful consideration, along with proactive planning and enforceable policies to mitigate the threats facing small businesses.
Luckily, key players in the IT industry, like HPE , can provide expert advice on how to best handle the pain points associated with keeping your business secure. Here are some insights that you can use to boost security in your organization.
Start with policy
According to the Ponemon Institute, 54 percent of the small organizations that had experienced a cyberattack traced the cause to a negligent employee or contractor; 49 percent of them didn't require password or biometric protections on mobile devices. As a mobile workforce grows, the challenge of managing employee-owned devices increases exponentially, and small and midsize business owners will need to create new policies to meet those challenges.
Small businesses must also understand that security is a lifetime commitment, not just a short-term investment to battle one-off threats. Securing devices by establishing and enforcing policies, and educating employees, and holding them accountable for adhering to those policies, is paramount, the U.S. Small Business Administration says.
When creating your policies, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) provides a framework that helps you think of security holistically. The framework encourages you to think of policies that address:
- Identification
- Protection
- Detection
- Response
- Recovery
Policies form the basis for strong cybersecurity, and they can help business owners determine how to best allocate their limited resources for the most effective security strategy. It's important to keep in mind that policies cannot accomplish much without the technology that supports them.
Security down to the server
To remain secure, small businesses must introduce advanced tools that can enforce their well-defined policies. These tools include the basicsโsuch as anti-malware products, intrusion-detection and prevention systems, application firewalls, and othersโas well as more innovative technologies like extra secure servers.
The HPE line of highly secure industry-standard servers offers innovative features that go beyond perimeter security, arming your systems to better prevent, detect, and recover from threats. The servers are facilitated by the proprietary Silicon Root of Trust firmware, which embeds a digital fingerprint directly into the silicon. If the unique fingerprint isn't detected, the server will not boot. If at any point a cyberattacker compromises the fingerprint, the Silicon Root of Trust will detect it, and HPE will alert you that your systems have been breached.
IT security needs to be at the forefront of IT operations and considered one of its primary functions. After all, protecting data and systems is much cheaper than recovering from an intrusion, breach, or compliance violation.
Looking for the latest information on technologies that are transforming small businesses? Look no further than Hewlett Packard Enterprise's Worldwide SMB 2019 Predictions.
Ready to take the next step? Check out the SMB Hybrid IT for Dummies Guide. Because there are no "dumb" questions!
Are you ready to purchase? Visit the HPE Store.
RobertChecketts
Robert has over 25+ years of IT Marketing and Product Management leadership experience spanning country, Regional and WW organizations. Robert is a marketing executive with extensive experience in field marketing, channel marketing and product marketing on a global basis and is driven to deliver SMBโs end-to-end affordable infrastructure thatโs secure from the start, optimized for every workload, packaged for many consumption models, ready to scale, and easy to manage.
