Your office may be in a nice area, but your business is in a high crime area

No matter where your business is physically located, the network it runs on lives in the seediest of places, where thieves, vandals, and extortionists lurk. If you could see how they’re watching you, how they’re disguising themselves and tricking your employees, you’d be alarmed enough to actively secure your network.

Threats to your company’s network far exceed the physical dangers of burglary, vandalism, fire, or natural disasters, for which you buy insurance. You would try to avoid locating your business in a place where criminal gangs constantly roam the streets, rattling doors, breaking the locks at night, gaining access and taking whatever they want.

But your network lives out there in cyberspace, which is infested with cybercriminals from around the globe, working around the clock, to find ever more devious ways to gain access and take whatever they want. Your business may be small, but they don’t care about size. They care about easy access and data. Your data is valuable and exploitable.

So what’s a small business to do? Start with a reality check. Ask yourself, how secure is my network? Is anyone monitoring it or are there only passive protocols in place? If you’re paying for cybersecurity, do you know if it’s working?

The fastest, easiest, cheapest way to get a picture of your network security is with a Vulnerability Scan. It costs less than a coffee shop latte for each workstation. In minutes, it can scan for over 230,000 known vulnerabilities and exposures. That’s a good start.

But to keep your business protected, you need a fierce cybersecurity plan. Cybercriminals up their game every day, so passive solutions are not enough. At mPowered IT, we put layer upon layer of protection in place, including 24/7 monitoring and active threat hunting to make it so difficult to penetrate, the gangs of cybercriminals are more likely to leave you alone and look for easier prey.

Just to put it in perspective: There are 33.2 million small businesses in the US. According to NFPA.org, the average number of fires to Mercantile or Business per year is 18,670. So the chance that your business will be damaged by fire is .5%. 

According to the 2023 Business Impact Report, 73% of small business owners experienced a data breach or cyberattack in the past year.

The reason for the huge disparity in risk levels between a fire and a cyberattack is that there are not people inside or outside of your organization sneaking around with torches hoping to burn your business down. There’s no reward for that. But there are thousands of people out there (a few potentially within as well) who have a financial incentive to attempt a cyberattack. 

Of course you should have fire insurance, but the bigger, more present, more costly threat is in your network. The cost of fire damage is high but finite, and it generally brings public sympathy. The cost of a cyberattack is extensive, can harm your customers and your reputation, and often brings blame to the business for not protecting them.

Because we all operate in a cyber world now, you can’t relocate your business to a safer neighborhood, but you can force your predators to retreat. We’re a small business advocate on a mission to protect your business from cyberthreats. Let’s talk. Call us at 678-389-6200.