Are you on the fence about investing in tech safety for your business?

If you’re in this situation, you’re not alone. Millions of small business owners in the U.S. have to decide whether it’s worth it to invest in various IT security measures, which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

5 Key Reasons Tech Safety Is Important for Your Business

Most of these business owners haven’t experienced a cyberattack and its devastating consequences, so it’s easy to see why most of them are undecided.

5 Key Reasons Tech Safety Is Important for Your Business

Here’s the thing, though. In 2021, you’ve got no choice but to invest in your business’s IT security. In this article, we’re giving you a handful of reasons why this is necessary.

Read on!

Small Businesses Are Prime Cyberattack Targets

There’s a good chance your business has never come down under a cyberattack. There’s also a good chance you think that the reason you’ve never been attacked is your business is too small to pique any hacker’s interest.

How wrong!

Here’s the truth. In 2019, 43 percent of cyberattacks targeted small businesses like yours. It’s 2021 now, so it’s fair to assume that this number has gone up, certainly up to at least 50 percent.

In essence, this means there’s a 50 percent chance your business will soon become a target of a cyberattack. When this happens, will your business be ready to fight back? If you answered “no,” there’s no more time to waste. Start investing in IT security.

If you don’t know where to start, don’t worry. You can outsource the task to a company that offers small business IT support and leave the rest to them.

IT Breaches Are a Leading Cause of Business Failure

The high small business failure rate in the U.S. is well documented: About 20 percent of new businesses will collapse within one year.

There are several reasons behind this high failure rate and one of them is data breaches.

Yes, a single data breach can bring your business to its knees. There are different ways this can happen.

If hackers penetrate your business, they can steal confidential data and hold you at ransom. They can ask you to pay a price so high that it will drive your business to bankruptcy.

Data breaches also have legal consequences. If you run a medical practice, for example, you have a legal obligation to ensure the privacy of your patient’s health information.

If such information is lost, your practice will face hefty fines that can lead to bankruptcy. The loss of customer trust can also dent your business big time.

Hackers can also dismantle your website and render it useless. There have been cases where hackers hijacked an entire website, making it impossible for the owner to access or retrieve it. When this is the case, you might have no option but to give up the website and start building another from scratch.

In short, a data breach can spell an end to your business. If you don’t want this to happen, you need to take IT security seriously.

Avoid Unnecessary Financial Losses

The cost of a data breach is $8 million.

Did you just hold your breath after reading that figure? If you did, that’s probably because you can’t afford to foot such a huge bill should your business experience a data breach.

If it’s of any consolation, you aren’t alone. The vast majority of small businesses in the U.S. won’t recover from a data breach.

Even if your business has the money to recover from a data breach, you don’t want to spend millions of dollars you hadn’t budget for.

Increase Customer Trust in Your Business

Gone are the days when all you needed to do to earn customer trust is offering a quality product and great customer service. In the Digital Age, you have to do a lot more.

One of the things you need to do today to earn customer trust is to put your business’s tech safety first. When customers visit your business website, they want to feel safe.

There are different things, including HTTPS, that they can look at to assess the safety of the website.

Especially if you sell on your website, customer trust is a big deal. For someone to input their personal and financial information on your website, they have to trust the site.

In addition to increasing customer trust, tech safety also improves the trust and confidence your employees have in your business.

They’ll feel more comfortable using workplace computers when they know that they’re protected against cyberattacks. This can motivate them and improve their productivity.

Great Peace of Mind

As a business owner, you’re already facing a lot of challenges. The COVID-19 pandemic, for example, might have caused your business to incur big losses.

There’s already a lot on your mind keeping you awake at night. Why would you want to add salt to your wounds by failing to embrace cybersecurity?

When you have taken care of the IT security of your business, you’ll rest easy, knowing hackers aren’t going to have a walk in the park should they decide to attack your business.

Put Your Business’s Tech Safety First

You might be hesitant to invest in your business’s tech safety because your business has never been attacked. Or maybe you don’t have the money to do so.

Regardless of your situation, you should prioritize your business’s IT security; otherwise, you stand to lose the company you have worked so hard to build.

Keep tabs on our blog for more business and technology insights.

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