4 Ways for Small and Mid-sized Atlanta Businesses to Prevent a Data Breach

Every year, another security breach breaks across the world. Viruses – Worms – Malware – Phishing – Trojans – Spam – Bots… these threats might be substantially different in how they execute, but whatever buzzword that comes out next year will mean the same thing to your small business: security risk.

Small Businesses Are Vulnerable to Cyberattacks

Most small businesses do very little – or nothing – to defend their intellectual property. The Atlanta SMB market still considers itself too unimportant for hackers to attack. But hackers are starting to notice and exploit these weaknesses.

Between 2011 and 2013, the small business share of total cyberattacks nearly doubled, jumping from 18% to 30% in a matter of two years. Mid-sized businesses jumped from 19% to 31% of the total in one year, according to Symantec.  Either this has resulted from more, small-time hackers entering the black market, or possibly due to larger corporations adding vinegar to the honey by improving their defenses. Either way, the sharks are circling SMB.

Now, most small businesses have experienced a data breach (55%). And when customer data and record-keeping is involved, these can cost significant sums of money – enough to send businesses into bankruptcy.

How to Protect Small Business from a Data Breach?

This trajectory very powerfully shows that small businesses no longer have a free pass on the cybernetic seas. The question is: what can you do to protect the business from harm?

Centerpoint Direct has compiled a short list of actions to take in order to achieve the maximum protection in 2015.

1. Train employees and owners re: security principles – accidental release of records – either by owners or employees – was the cause for almost one-third of data breaches in the US.

2. Create a mobile device strategy – (Read our article on BYOD security containment for more information about this…)

3. Use 2-step security validation whenever possible, and train on the importance of a good password

4. Consider cloud security solutions as a low-cost, high efficacy layer of protection against theft.

Centerpoint Direct wants our clients to be well-informed and protected. Please give our office a call for more info, sign up for one of our upcoming webinars on cloud security, or come back next week for a the first of a two part series on data breaches: how to know if you have suffered from a security breach, and what you are legally required to do.