Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are the biggest targets of cybercriminals, and they often don’t have the necessary budgets, people, processes, and products to protect themselves. Because of this, SMBs are increasingly turning their cybersecurity protection over to managed service providers (MSPs).
Today’s cybersecurity is good, with most prevention solutions having a 99.9% or higher detection rate for common malware, but once penetrated, identification is usually a case of too little, too late. The mean time to identify (MTTI) a data breach was 201 days, and a mean time to contain (MTTC) was 70 days. In up to 70% of cases, data breaches were detected by third parties.
While overall IT budgets are experiencing minimal growth - a compound annual growth rate of 0.9 percent in 2016 (to $3.4 trillion) - the sky is the limit when it comes to cloud: Cloud infrastructure spending will increase 16.2 percent in 2016 to $37.4 billion, with a 5-year CAGR of 13.6 percent to $60.8 billion in 2020. That’ss just the hardware; public cloud services are expected to reach $208 billion in 2016, up from $178 billion in 2015. Gartner attributes the growth to the fact that organizations are saving 14 percent of their budgets as an outcome of public cloud adoption.
One of the realities of today’s cybersecurity threatscape is not if you will be breached, but when, and how often. As good as cybersecurity is becoming - i.e. prevention solutions provide a 99.9 percent or higher detection rate for common malware - effective cybersecurity depends upon three pillars - prevention, detection and resolution - with the latter two required to address those situations where prevention isn’t enough.
While small and medium businesses don’t appear to be as concerned about their cybersecurity vulnerabilities as they should be - i.e. SMBs are the principal targets of cybercrime and as many as 60 percent of hacked SMBs go out of business after six months - the reality is that the growing and rapidly changing threatscape and limited resources are driving them to outside help to protect their businesses. That protection can include assessments, remote monitoring and management, and backup and disaster recovery, but one way to stand out from the competition is to focus on their risk tolerances and customize your offerings to their individual risk appetites.
With the digital threatscape proliferating exponentially - i.e. phishing emails increased almost 800 percent quarter-to-quarter in Q1 2016, to 6.3 million, while ransomware soared 300 percent year-over-year on its way to a billion-dollar-a-year problem - it’s important to remember that effective cybersecurity rests on three pillars - products and services, processes, and people. Simply throwing more money and resources at cybersecurity is not the answer: People are the key, and everybody has a role to play in effective cybersecurity.
