Cybersecurity Is Not an IT Problem. It Is a Business Survival Problem.
The average cost of a data breach for a small business is $164,000. Most do not survive it.
I do security assessments for mid-market companies. Every single time, I find the same things: admin passwords that have not been changed in years, MFA disabled on critical accounts, former employees with active credentials, and API keys hardcoded in public repositories.
Nobody thinks it will happen to them. Then it does. And the cleanup costs more than the prevention ever would have.
The Small Business Myth
"We are too small to be a target." This is the most dangerous sentence in business. Attackers do not target companies by size. They target companies by vulnerability. Automated scanners do not care if you have 5 employees or 5,000. They care that your WordPress admin panel is exposed and your password is Password123.
The Five Things That Actually Matter
- MFA everywhere. Email, ERP, banking, cloud services. If it has a login, it has MFA. This alone prevents 80% of account compromise.
- Access reviews. Quarterly. Who has access to what? Does the marketing intern still have admin on your financial systems? (I have seen this. More than once.)
- Backup and test. Having backups is table stakes. Testing that you can actually restore from them is the part everyone skips. Do a restore drill once a quarter.
- Patch management. Stop snoozing updates. That "critical security patch" is not optional. Automate it where possible.
- Incident response plan. Not a 50-page document nobody reads. A one-page card: who to call, what to shut down, how to communicate. Practice it once a year.
Security is not a product you buy. It is a practice you maintain. The companies that treat it as an ongoing discipline — not a one-time project — are the ones still standing after everyone else gets breached.