Unfortunately, this isn’t a joke with a funny punchline. It’s a serious question with a sobering reponse…
The answer? A nasty data breach. That is, a security violation by a dodgy individual who accesses your sensitive, protected or confidential information and then uses it – stealing it, releasing it, blackmailing you with it, and so on.
Take this sobering fact: up to 94% of companies that experience a severe data loss never recover.
The impact of data loss can be so significant that it eventually sinks a business. This is partly because it can take around 280 days (over nine months) to identify and contain a data breach and by then the damage has been done.
Sadly, research tells us that 51% of companies close within two years of the incident, 43% do not reopen again, and almost 70% of small businesses close within a year of a large data loss.
Now with such a drastic impact on a business and with criminal cyber activity on the rise for businesses of all sizes, you’d be right to assess this as a real risk to your business that you should address.
I know that for many SME business owners in NZ, IT just something that costs money and is annoying when it doesn’t work. But ask yourself: How much do I lose in time and money if my IT goes on the fritz?
Can my business operate without access to our invoicing system, banks, works system, quoting system, CMS etc?
Will my customers still want to do business with me if a) I can’t pay them, b) They don’t know how much to pay me, c) I have given the whole world their customers’ details, and d) I have no idea what I am working on.
How easily can I get hold of a few million dollars if my data is stolen and sold back to me?
Will my staff come to work if I can’t pay them or even communicate with them?
I know it sounds extreme and like a plot out of a far-reaching movie but I have personally seen each one of these events happen. (Ask me over a few beers one time; no names will be revealed.) And I can tell you that in each and every one of those cases, not only were the financial repercussions high, so were the stress levels. For weeks. “A good night’s sleep” was in no one’s vocabulary. I’m not saying this to scare you but to give you a reality check of what can happen and the impact it will have on your life should it happen.
This isn’t just about security, either. Just like cars, TVs and marriages, computers break down. They get old and past it and just crap out. So if your system decides it’s had enough, have you got a backup in place? How long will that take?
For most companies, IT is now a major part of their business. All it takes is a power-cut for that realisation to hit home. Can you imagine your company running without IT? “We can go back to paper!” – try it for a week and then let me know how it went.
So, let’s just say IT is important to you and you’d be lost without it.
- Should you be concerned of what the impact of a data breach on your business would be? Yes.
- Is protecting your business from that risk an easy fix? Yes.
- Will you need to part with money? Probably yes – unless you have the perfect processes (I haven’t seen any of those yet.)
- Can Rocket IT fix it for you? Of course.
- Can you just leave it because it’s fine at the moment? Sure, but it’s like that spare key for the car – you don’t need it until you desperately need it. And unfortunately the bill to help you fix that will be bigger…