A Cloudy Situation: Meeting The Security Needs Of SMEs

By Oscar Marquez, CTO, iSheriff

Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD) have been used by IT security vendors to scare customers into buying their products for many years. This continues to be an effective tactic even now, but the only difference is that vendors don’t have to try very hard — the stream of cyber-attack and global data breach headlines does the job for them.

This can leave small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with a disturbing problem. While most have the same data confidentiality and compliance issues as those of larger enterprises, they often lack the security budgets and trained personnel to mitigate the risks. This is compounded by evidence criminals are turning their attention to these smaller companies. According to PwC’s 2015 global State of Information Security Survey, 62 percent of data breaches that year were at the SME level.

Criminals don’t care who they are attacking as they have viruses or ransomware to attack thousands or millions at the same time, while some experts believe SMEs are serving as test lab for techniques to use on larger targets.

The traditional approach to IT security has been to employ individual solutions to monitor and control each threat type individually. The idea is to get the best product for each security task. However, each product requires time and training to set up, maintain and, operate, plus additional time for any integration and coordination between the products.

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