Cybersecurity – the cost of not having it

Cybersecurity protects the bottom line

If you are wondering how to justify spending your hard-earned income on cybersecurity when you’ve never experienced a ransomware incident, you believe you have adequately educated your employees not to click on links in suspicious emails or haven’t seen what malware can do to one of your IT devices, you’re not alone. Even if you or your business hasn’t been adversely affected by a malicious security attack, you still probably have a gut feeling you are living on borrowed time and have been lucky so far.  If that is what you are feeling, you are correct.   It’s not a matter of if, but when.

One way to think about investing in cybersecurity is to use the analogy of insurance, whether for your home or car.  Even if you have never been involved in a car accident, hadn’t had a heavy tree branch fall on your house, or filed a claim for a loss, you still know the importance of having insurance to protect these valuable assets.  Because if something bad happened, it could be devastating to your financial well-being.

The same holds true for your business.  But instead of providing for post-event recovery, you are creating a proactive prevention strategy, as at the end of the day you can’t afford to sit idle and let a catastrophic event send your business into bankruptcy.   And that is exactly what happens to about two-thirds of businesses who suffer from a data breach or cyber attack – they go out of business within 6 months of the incident, never having fully recovered from it.   

The decision to incorporate cybersecurity into your IT infrastructure is less about what it costs and more about what it provides, in terms of protecting your ability to effectively operate your business and bring in the revenue you need to not only keep the lights on, but prosper.  Cybersecurity must be viewed as a necessary and accepted business expense that needs to be incurred to safeguard your business from malicious actions that could occur otherwise. It must be viewed similarly to any other expense you consider to be a “cost of doing business”, such as legal services, utility expenses or payroll.   Like all these other operating expenses, cybersecurity is instrumental to the core of your systems and to your business strategy.

Cybersecurity is more important now than ever before

 The Covid-19 pandemic, which sent a vast number of employees home to work, ushered forth a drastic increase in the number of cyber threats and attacks.  With so many workers transitioning from in-office to remote work, in such a sudden and short period of time, many companies weren’t properly equipped to handle the overwhelming enormity of the move required, thus creating new vulnerabilities with higher levels of exposure and risk. Couple that with malicious actors taking advantage of the new openings and you have a perfect storm for exploitation.

Many businesses cobbled together a strategy the best they could, often following a “do-it-yourself” approach and “fix it as it comes” philosophy to handle the cyber attacks that followed.  Without a proactive and effective cybersecurity plan in place however, for every hole plugged a new vulnerability may pop up. It’s not that cybercrimminals invented a plethora of new schemes, they just exploited the Covid theme and took advantage of the increased number of open systems, resulting from the work from home transition, with systems no longer being protected behind the corporate firewall.  Although the urgency created by Covid-19 has peaked, business philosophies about working from home look to have forever changed, with more employees than ever before being remote and untethered from corporate safeguards, thus necessitating strong and proper controls be in place.

Fortunately, NTS customers already had a sound security strategy centered around NTS managed services, endpoint protection, and a complete suite of cybersecurity tools.  Although the number of attacks increased, the correct measures were in place to thwart those threats and render them harmless.  Preventing something bad from happening before it happens is a far better strategy than repairing the damage after it occurs.  It’s also less expensive!  

When the importance of cybersecurity is fully understood, business owners know the solutions they need to ensure the foundation of their systems is protected, safe and secure.  Although there are no absolute guarantees around security, just like there are no guarantees you won’t get into a car accident nor experience damage to your home, having a proactive plan in place will mitigate the loss from bad things that happen.  It’s just like the insurance you buy to provide peace of mind.  Incorporating a managed cybersecurity strategy into your systems platform will identify most attacks before they happen and provide for better corrective actions if they do.

 Investing in cybersecurity from NTS is easy

 NTS provides a robust cybersecurity offering as part of our managed services.  Our customers receive a proactive, effective solution through the use of high-quality tools employed by a team of experts with a broad and deep skill set.   With over 25 years of experience in the industry, we work with small and medium-sized businesses to manage the intricacies of technology and provide foundational systems support to enable them to focus on their operations and their customers.