Small Business Cybersecurity Plan

 

Why a Small Business Cybersecurity Plan Should Be a Priority in 2024

While we mostly hear about data breaches, ransomware attacks, and other hacking attempts affecting large companies, 50% of cyber attacks target small & medium-sized businesses, and over 60% of those attacks go out of business. For many small businesses, understanding the latest cybersecurity technology can be as challenging as keeping up with emerging cyber threats and risks—never mind the ever-changing regulatory landscape and new compliance demands.

Meanwhile, tight budgets can make getting ahead of increasingly sophisticated cyber threats even more difficult for smaller companies. That is why investing in a cybersecurity strategy should be at or near the top of the priority list of every small business in 2024.

How can small business owners bolster their cybersecurity positions despite persistent resource challenges, budget constraints, and accelerating change? The foundation for robust SMB cybersecurity is an effective cybersecurity strategy that reflects business goals, addresses critical gaps, and delivers measurably improved cyber resilience. Developing a business-aligned two-year to five-year cybersecurity strategy is one approach to ensuring business success.

A cybersecurity plan as a business enabler

A business-focused security strategy helps keep you on a path to efficient and effective outcomes and ensures your cybersecurity investments are a business enabler. Cybersecurity exists to serve the business. So, before implementing new controls or even analyzing risks, start by identifying what your business is trying to accomplish.

For example, if your business strategy focuses on growth, your small business's cybersecurity plan needs the skill to scale and support that growth easily. This might mean prioritizing specific changes to your security program to help sales and marketing or some other key growth area of your business. From there, you can make better tactical choices, like investing in a security tool.

You want to demonstrate to customers, employees, potential investors, and other stakeholders that the company takes cybersecurity seriously. This can be a competitive differentiator that helps keep existing customers and attract new ones, improve employee retention, make your business attractive to potential investors, and more. A cybersecurity program reduces risk, thereby preserving a business's value and creating new value.

Consider business risks in a cybersecurity strategy.

A cybersecurity plan that aligns with business goals also factors in business risks. This helps ensure the security program reduces the chance of top threats like ransomware attacks and data exfiltration. Understanding risks also supports a faster and more effective incident response, thus potentially reducing financial and reputational damage should an attack occur.

But to reduce cyber risk or coordinate incident response, employees need direction and guidance—i.e., a formal security policy. Having a formal plan shows employees that the company takes cybersecurity seriously, so they will, too. A plan also serves as a guide for employees to follow to ensure compliance with federal, state, and local regulations and internal security goals.

For example, a security policy can guide employees in collecting, storing, and processing sensitive data. It can also influence technology purchases to ensure interoperability with other systems and help avoid “security silos” caused by individual employees or teams choosing technology in a vacuum.

A “product strategy” alone is insufficient.

Security products can be vital to a business's success, especially those that offer essentials, like multifactor authentication (MFA), encryption, and endpoint detection and response (EDR). But a security strategy that’s just a “product strategy” can waste precious resources, fail to meet the needs of a business, and still leave a business exposed to unacceptable and avoidable cyber risks. Tactical decisions, like what products to buy, should be steered by a business's goals and any potential risks. If your business aims to embrace cloud-based technology, for instance, then your security tool purchases should reflect that.

Another problem with a product-centric security strategy is increased administrative, integration, and training complexity. Many small businesses have an overload of security products from multiple vendors, each of which must be kept operational, updated, licensed, etc. Many times, these products are not fully implemented or are not complementary to each other. Small businesses should invest in security solutions suited to their business, complementary under one unified umbrella, and won’t be wasted or inefficiently used.