Top Reasons Why Cyber Security for Business Matters More Than Ever
Reading Time: 6 minutes
Today, what all is omnipresent is – Technology, in some or the other form. One of its components is Artificial Intelligence (AI) that has become the most important part of every aspect of our lives. Whether it is about searching for something online, or seeking navigation while on road, the role of AI is everywhere. Even staying unaware, we are benefitted by AI, being assisted by it in several ways. Of course, AI has optimized businesses operations and has made them not only more efficient and productive, but also capable enough of making more sales.
AI works on real-time data received as response from chatbots, wherever they are integrated and so makes frees up other manual resources for other critical tasks. The reason behind why has AI these days, been playing a pioneering role in sale also is, it is extremely accurate and operates on the basis of previous data and its patterns. It studies these patterns and accordingly determines the future courses of action and probabilities.
It optimizes the processes and shifts them from their regular base to a more predictive base. It runs through a huge amount of historical data, learns the patterns that develop. To able to learn a particular pattern, it combs through the enormous data again and again – a task that cannot be done just with human intervention.
Such data patterns give a great insight in to how should the further course of action be. For example, you can easily determine, when should you be shooting the emails depending upon when are they opened the maximum during the day. AI studies the patterns and accordingly builds accurate models to be followed.
AI has revolutionized the entire sales industry with applications that help the sales teams pitch-in better.
Let’s dig in deep to find, in what ways is sales benefitting with AI.
Crisis for Businesses, Opportunity for Hackers
With little or no preparedness, where the organizations tried their best to carry on with their operations even in such crises, the hackers found opportunities.
Do you know, 76% business organizations suffered losses due to the lack of cyber security preparedness? Owing to the valid reason that you cannot just keep going on with compromised security, time has come that the business organizations start considering security as the prime objective.
Why? Here are some very obvious reasons!
Work from Remote Locations
As the pandemic struck, so did the idea to work from different remote locations. Even the organizations based upon onsite operations had no option but allow their employees to work from whichever location they had been putting in, so that they could maintain the productivity. With employees working outside the office already, a lot more of the organization comes out, such as hardware, software and of course the crucial data that is supposed to be within the walls of corporate server rooms.
The remote work culture opens up various access points, and thus the gates for the hackers too, from where they can enter the organization’s network.
Therefore, no matter, how productive may the businesses be, if the security is compromised at any level, the productivity is not worth it, and may even lead to losses. Tightening the security infrastructure should be the prime focus for all businesses. That does not mean that they should not consider remote functioning, they need to deploy the solutions that ensure security of their valuable data, while they work remotely.
Increased Probability of Threat
The league of hackers is so notorious that they keep going on with their hacking attempts all the time. The pandemic may have slowed down almost every aspect of life and everybody, but not hackers, who stay on the lookout of any chance to peep in to crucial access points.
It is quite scary to know that the FBI has reported of the increase in cybercrime by whopping 300%, when the pandemic had started. Well, this is what has been reported. There are numerous instances, when such cases do not even come into light.
We need to accept that, no matter what, such a heavy rate of cybercrime cannot be controlled or the nature of these hackers cannot be changed. All that can be done is, the organizations should get more vigilant and this can be done by taking some stringent actions to level-up the security.
Small Businesses at Higher Vulnerability
No matter, how big or small the business be, the hackers pose a threat for one and all. They target every business, irrespective of its size and profile. In past few years, the small businesses have been the soft target for these hackers, so much that 43% cyberattacks were aimed at small businesses, as reported by CNBC.
Even the author of “Cybersecurity Is Everybody’s Business” and “Hacked Again,” Scott Schober has said “There are 30 million small businesses in the U.S. that need to stay safe from phishing attacks, malware spying, ransomware, identity theft, major breaches and hackers who would compromise their security.”
Why is it so?
It’s well stated by Scott E. Augenbaum, former supervisory special agent at the FBI’s Cyber Division, Cyber Crime Fraud Unit, who says “Small and medium sized businesses lack the financial resources and skill set to combat the emerging cyber threat.”
In fact, the hackers are finding newer means to intrude in to the companies’ networks and create havoc for them.
Right Security Solutions, Need of Hour
Unfortunately, cyber security is not taken as seriously, as it should be. Some businesses even consider it as an unnecessary expenditure, till the time they finally repent. They don’t realise that the cost of prevention that they try to save is far lesser than the cost they are made to pay for due to security breach.
According to UpGuard 2021, of all the biggest data breaches like Yahoo, 3 billion accounts (2013); Aadhar, 1.1 billion (2018); Verifications.io, 763 million (2019); First American Financial Corporation, 885 million (2019); Facebook, 540 million (2019); Marriott, 500 million (2018); Yahoo, 500 million (2014); MySpace, 360 million (2013) and Adult FriendFinder, 412.2 million (2016); the biggest data breach was reported in 2020 known as Cam4 data breach, that involved 10.88 billion accounts.
It is scary to even imagine the growing extent of cybercrimes during the pandemic. Therefore, it becomes important to adopt the right security solutions following right strategies and channels, to let the businesses prevent being victims of such cyber threats.
