Security has always been important for family businesses, but in 2019, security doesn’t just mean security cameras and locks on the door: it also means protecting your business’s data from hackers and ransomware attacks.
According to the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology, cyber crime poses and “existential threat” to small businesses in the twenty-first century. Understanding the dangers of doing business online and investing in adequate protections is no longer optional for companies that want to build a sustainable future.
This is because small businesses are increasingly being hit by cyber criminals who believe family-owned companies make better targets than large corporations with a lot of resources to invest into cyber security technology.
A company like Dropbox might be able to offer a much bigger payoff for successful hackers, but it also has much better defenses: many cyber criminals have weighed the options and decided that attacking a dozen smaller businesses is easier than going after one major company.
Not only do small businesses often lack the resources that larger companies have to combat cyber crime, they are also more likely have an insufficient understanding of the gravity and nature of cyber security threat — after all, if you make your living through a small legal practice, dental office, or sales company, your expertise is probably not in IT. In many cases, a family business may not even know cyber criminals have targeted it until the attack has actually been sprung.
For this reason, no matter the size of your business, 2019 should be the year you decide to enforce strong cyber-security protections that will guarantee that you are properly defended from malware, spyware, and hackers. For most companies, this will mean investing in encrypted smartphones.
Encrypted smartphones are the gold standard of protection. Company email is the most common vector of attack, and hackers and cyber criminals often try to gain access to private messages so they can harvest passwords and banking information. Because encryption makes it impossible for hackers or cyber criminals to decrypt private messages, it leaves them with no access point into your private data.
If you want to learn more about how encrypted smartphones work, you can click here to find out how providers like ChatMail Secure offer industry-leading encryption protection to businesses of all sizes.
ChatMail’s encryption protocol is built to offer businesses maximum security and maximum flexibility. With ChatMail, users can generate new encryption keys at the click of a button, and have access to popular messaging tools like chat, image, and voice messaging. And because ChatMail phones don’t store any information on external servers, the only way to gain access to the message logs is through the phones themselves, which are tamper-proof and password protected.
Most family businesses begin because people believe they have something to offer the world and a dream of starting their own company. But once a business starts to make money, it is important to guard against malicious agents seeking to take advantage of your success. Don’t let your dream become a nightmare — protect your investment and your livelihood with state-of-the-art tools like encrypted smartphones.
