Data breaches are becoming an ever-present threat to modern businesses and organisations. These dangers are continually evolving in number and complexity. Hackers keep finding new ways to steal critical information and make a profit of businesses’ hard work. While it is impossible to protect your network entirely from all kinds of intrusion, you can make a thorough data breach prevention plan to minimise these risks and the impact in the future. In this post, we’ll show you a few reasons why it’s essential for small businesses to plan everything to avoid common issues with their data.
What is data breach?
Before learning the importance of a prevention plan, it is essential to understand what data breach is. A data breach is an exposure of confidential or sensitive data, both business and personal, to unauthorised networks or personnel. Organisations and companies of all types and sizes are susceptible to this issue, including multinational corporations which invest billions of dollar in data security and privacy.
Sensitive or critical data does not necessarily need to be deleted, copied, or stolen to be a cause for concern. The wrong person simply viewing the information might be considered a data breach. Nevertheless, the former case can lead to much more significant loss and damage.
There are many reasons why data can be breached, from black hackers‘ attacks and inappropriate IT infrastructures to employee’s mistakes. No matter how much data or information is breached, it might lead to extremely serious situations that can negatively affect your operation. That’s why it is essential to have a data breach prevention plan and minimise these risks.
The importance of data breach prevention plans
- Data breaches hurt small companies most
As a start-up or small business scales up, it will be dealing with a higher volume of external and in-house customer data. But due to the lack of financial and human resources, these organisations typically can’t build sufficient IT infrastructure to meet the increasing demands. As a result, over 58% of companies suffering from data breaches are small businesses. Due to this issue, they have lost a significant amount of money, commercial credits and even business reputation.
The most effective solution is to create a comprehensive data breach prevention plan. In addition to traditional security methods like firewalls or antivirus, business owners should find out any possible risks in the existing IT infrastructure through an IT health check and have the right backups in case it is hacked or stolen.
- Recover from a data breach might be costly
The expenses of recovery from cyber-attacks are staggering and quickly increasing over the past few years. In the worst cases, it can result in the shutdown of your businesses. On average, the cost of hiring an IT service to resolve data breaches might range from $30,000 up to $50,000. For small businesses or start-ups, this amount might be even the total value of their company. That’s why preventive measures must be taken to avoid becoming a victim.
- Ensure business growth
Since most start-ups and small businesses are still in their earlier stages, they need to keep their company growing stable and continue to get more customers. A serious problem like a data breach can lead to the shutdown of the operation for several days or even weeks. Thus, it might reduce their competitive advantages and lose the client base that they’ve built over the past years. A good prevention plan will minimise those risks and ensure your company can operate steadily.
As part of the digital development, all small businesses should develop a good data breach prevention plan, which details what measures they will take to ensure their networks and employees are protected from cyber threats. Additionally, it is necessary to outline exact steps that each employee should perform each day to ensure that information about your clients and business are protected. Though this process might take time and effort, it can prevent your company from severe cases that can lead to the loss or steal of all valuable and critical data.
getNEXT‘s Cloud Secure gives you comprehensive protection against any cyber-attacks. Let getNEXT provide you with peace of mind without worrying about data breaches or system downtime and improve your current IT performance.
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