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Technology

Shield against Online Risks & Threats

Rishi Sonwal
Sep 2010

In the present times of technological advancements, the emerging new technologies have also brought along newer threats of varied nature resulting in huge losses to the businesses everywhere.

The domain of information technology is fast expanding and so are the risks in the online business operations especially in the small and medium businesses sector.

These threats not only pose serious losses to the businesses, these ruin the important data or damage it. There is also a looming threat of your classified data being stolen by the hackers.

Often the large corporate have enough security shield against virus attacks or online protection solutions and can also manage manpower. But the small and medium businesses are at a loss to manage and are not well guarded against these threats. According to a survey, about 67 percent of the Indian SMBs are most concerned about data loss, and are getting serious about protecting their information. Research further suggests that 80 percent of the Indian SMBs are focusing on enhancing backup, recovery and archiving solutions, only 51 percent are in the process of installation.

Even as businesses of all sizes have to deal with unforeseen attacks, the SMB segment is most vulnerable to these evolved forms of cyber crimes. At 35 million units the Indian SMBs today, spend around US$9.9 billion on IT and the amount is predicted to rise by 8% in the current year. Yet in a struggling economy, much is expected from the SMBs. Small in size but big in influence, SMBs have used the Internet to extend market reach and build fruitful partnerships. But the very tools that propel growth can also leave them more vulnerable to risks beyond their four walls.

Cyber attacks continue to plague Indian SMBs, but there was an overall decline. Sixty-eight percent of SMBs were prone to a few cyber attacks this year, while 22 percent of SMBs faced them on a regular basis.

According to the annual 2009 Global SMB Disaster Preparedness Survey - India findings - the average SMB has experienced three outages within the past 12 months, with the leading causes being virus or hacker attacks, power outages or natural disasters. The survey found that only 18 percent SMBs back up daily and an average SMB backs up only 50 percent of their company and customer data on a daily basis.

There are many IT companies which provide complete security to the SMBs. Symantec is one of them. Symantec helps consumers and organizations secure and manage their information-driven world. Symantec solutions protect against more risks at more points, more completely and efficiently, enabling confidence wherever information is used or stored.

Symantec’s Internet Security Threat Report XV reveals continued growth in both the volume and sophistication of cyber crime attacks. Customer account information, credit and debit card numbers, important business files, intellectual property and other sensitive corporate content online - losing any one of them can be devastating to a small business. Whether it’s due to a malware attack, a server crash, or a loss of confidential information via email, downtime can be highly detrimental, if not fatal, to a small business.

SME WORLD interacted with David David Dzienciol, Vice President for Channel and SMB, Asia Pacific and Japan, Symantec recently.

Which are common security threats for the SMBs?

Small businesses have little bit of technologies and shields against the threats. Though the use of technologies is steep rising among the SMBs. Mobile, laptops, smart phones, etc. are now frequently adopted by the Indian professionals. If you take any small business, they have many mobile devices, computers, networks, internet, etc. Most of the business activities are being performed through these devices. If these can be accessed by the unwanted users, heavy losses can be take place. There are many threats, malware, natural disasters or man-made disasters which can be detrimental to the businesses. About 28 per cent of the SMBs in India which suffer internet threats don’t have mechanism of recovery. While large organizations have sufficient guard and experts to tackle the situation.

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