Would you leave your house unlocked if nearly half the homes in your area had been burgled? If an attack was likely, would you wait until after the break-in to act?
No? Then why treat your business that way?
As with any breach of security, a proactive response is always better than reactive – why wait for the damage to be done when you can try to prevent it in the first place?
With cyber attacks continually on the rise, it’s really important that all businesses, no matter their size, act proactively in response to the increase in attacks and successful hacks.
You might think reactive IT security will save you money, but it’s only in the short-term. In the longer-term you run the risk of increased financial costs, using the wrong tools for damage control, and no clear way of resolving issues.
Proactive approaches are all about anticipating that something might happen and being prepared for it. Proactive IT security leaves less room for cyber attackers to exploit your systems, and also makes it easier to identify problems sooner – and makes it easier to fix them.
Here are just two reasons why we think being proactive is the best attitude to take towards your IT security:
- No more constant clean-up
Unfortunately, cyber-attacks are no longer a rarity. Once upon a time, it might have been worth your while holding off on investing in IT security. Now, when 1/3 of UK businesses suffered an IT breach last year alone, it’s no longer a matter of “if” we see another breach, it’s “when”.
1/3 of UK organisations suffered IT breaches last year, even though 70% invested in some sort of IT security. Without an element of proactive IT security, this figure would be a lot higher.
After an attack, more damage will have been done when you don’t have some element of proactive IT security in place. Attacks damage your safety measures; you likely lose data which causes financial and reputational damage as well.
Clean-up costs can be enough to make your eyes water, and even more when coupled with loss of productively or revenue. It’s best to have security measures continuously in place to lessen some of the damage.
- Reactive security measures are often light work for pro-hackers
As much as you might believe otherwise, hackers will generally always be one step ahead – whether it’s through developing stealthier ways to attack, or new ways to hack and fool people.
Even the most unsophisticated hackers have access to coding which can easily evade antivirus (AV) detection. They’re often tuned into AV provider updates as well. This means that hackers get the same messages as clients when they are told to update their systems to account for new hacking codes.
This works as a push for hackers to roll out their new methods – putting businesses one-step behind the criminals.
It’s easy to treat IT security as something you don’t need straight away, but in the long run it’s much better for your company if you’re proactive about it. We can’t pretend a cyber attack just won’t happen – they’re becoming more and more likely every year as we become more globally and digitally-connected.
We can sit back and wait to do something after an attack, or we can be proactive and put in place some preventative measures to make your business less likely to be breached in the first place. Not only will this help put your mind at ease, it can also make your clients and customers at ease that their information will be less accessible to hackers.
With all this in mind, there’s so much that we at Consider IT can do to help you protect your business and your clients from cyberattacks before the take place, saving you in the long-term.
We can help you with everything from support services to improve productivity, increase security and reduce the overall costs to your business, to bring you through Cyber Essentials Accreditations. We’ll turn your back up platform from a “recovery in days/weeks” situation to “we’ll have you online anywhere in the world within 15 minutes”.
We even offer our purpose-built Disaster Recovery suite for your team to use in times of crisis.
Find out about all of the services we have on offer at https://considerit.com/what-we-do/managed-it-services/cyber-security/cyber-essentials/
Get in touch with us on 0131 510 0110 or [email protected] to chat about our IT support services.
