There are multiple reasons for investing money, time and effort in data protection. One of the primary reasons is reducing financial loss, followed by compliance
SMBs and enterprises are rapidly growing in number and becoming firm foundations upon which innovative, expensive selling networks can be enabled. However, while growing, an SMB or an enterprise will face the challenges of cyber threats.
Also, in the way Internet users come close to malware, hackers and phishing schemes, SMBs and enterprises might face direct attacks by malicious users keen on acquiring valuable data. For instance, 85% of organisations have suffered from phishing attacks during pandemic. These attacks are everywhere, and most organisations will encounter them at one point or another.
No business today, be it an SMB or a large corporation – should overlook implementing security measures. Also, not having an adequate plan in place for information security can result in dire consequences.
Here are five reasons why security is essential:
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To meet compliance requirements
With GDPR and CCPA. Organisations that do not implement privacy protection can face huge fines in the tens of millions of dollars and up to 20 years of penalties for non-compliance with laws, regulations, standards and their published privacy and security notices. Organisations also risk losing valuable business opportunities and business relationships by not complying with their contractual obligations and privacy protection requirements.
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To prevent breaches that hurt businesses
A privacy principle is common in all international privacy principles and a requirement in all data protection and privacy legislation requirements in implementing string security safeguards to protect personal information. Organisations – which implement such controls have chances of reducing the number of security breaches and security-related incidents.
If the number of violations is less, then the business might not lose trust, but by the time it might start losing customers or other business types eventually. It also means that the company does not have to deal with fines, multi-layers penalties or civil suits as an aftereffect of breaches.
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To prevent breaches that hurt data subjects or individuals
Privacy protection involves ensuring strong security measures for personal data and the other associated activities involving collecting, storing, processing, accessing, transmitting, sharing and disposing of the personal data. Organisations have not had robust, comprehensive data, security controls implemented throughout the entire organisation and every end-device.
By implementing security measures for personal data, breaches that negatively impact the data subjects can be avoided.
For instance, the results from just one security solution – Q2 2018 blocked 962,947,023 attacks launched from online resources located in 187 countries worldwide. Which could have resulted in breaches of personal data that could have harmed the associated data subjects – in really unlimited ways, if they were successful.
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To maintain and improve brand value
According to Forbes Insights, 46 per cent of organisations suffered damage to their reputation and brand value due to privacy breaches. Also, the organisations that explicitly make clear that protecting their consumers’ privacy is a primary goal – that cares about their consumers’ privacy and support meeting that goal with transparent and consistently followed privacy practices that demonstrate this care. It will build emotional connections to their brand – which will improve the brand value.
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To strengthen and grow business
According to a Pew’s report – 93 per cent Americans needed to have control over the entities and individuals who can get information about them. Almost 90 per cent said that they wanted to handle the specific types of information collected about them. And this attitude seems to be quite similar across the globe.
Businesses – which implement privacy protections, provide data protection controls over entities and individuals will strengthen and grow their business. And as a result, they become preferred by consumers over their competitors who do not offer such rules.
What Can Companies Do?
Adding an extra layer of information security will go a long way in preventing unauthorised access to business systems and hardware. Many enterprises wrongly believe that exploiters primarily target them because they offer immense payoffs. While it’s true, larger businesses do possess more data to abuse from an unethical hacker’s point of view. However, in reality, cybercriminals are going after SMEs as they tend to have more accessible systems and fewer defence systems to penetrate.
Some of the most common software security vulnerabilities include:
- Missing data encryption
- OS command injection
- SQL injection
- Buffer overflow
- Missing authentication for critical function
- Missing authorisation
- Unrestricted upload of dangerous file types
- Reliance on untrusted inputs in a security decision
- Addressing these concerns will help enterprises to secure their data and run businesses securely, whatever may be the contingency
