Imagine, for a minute, that you’re the CEO of a promising new startup. In the beginning, it was just you and two other employees working on dinky PCs out of a 12-by-12-foot office, but business is picking up and the company is heading into the uncharted waters of rapid growth.
As the business moves into the public eye — and, in turn, the hungry eyes of potential hackers it’s becoming obvious that you’re going to need to lock down
your data. At this critical stage, a cyber-attack could mean the death of everything you and your team have built.
But the budget is looking lean. Everything you’ve done so far has been by the skin of your teeth, so why should security be any different? You put one of your
more tech-savvy employees on the case, tasking him with finding the cheapest security solutions available. Sure, he may not be an expert, but he understands computers. What could go wrong?
He scours the web, searching for “Top 5 Cheap Firewall” articles, and, with the help of a scrappy how-to guide, installs what seems to be the best of the lot on your servers and across all your computers. The entire process takes 10 hours, and costs the company very little.
Potential crisis averted, you turn your attention to other matters. You tell yourself that you will revisit cybersecurity later, after you have a little more financial wiggle room.
In the following year, the company’s success skyrockets. The phone is ringing off the hook, new business is flooding in and your profit margin is exploding. You even ended up snagging a feature in Entrepreneur magazine. Your company is the envy of all your peers.
That is, until the day that you get hacked. One morning, an advanced strain of ransomware easily sidesteps your free antivirus and starts wreaking havoc. It slithers through your systems and locks you out of everything, from client data to basic Word documents, and encrypts it behind a paywall, demanding $10,000 in Bitcoin or you’ll lose access to all of it — forever.
You couldn’t make room in your budget for a robust cyber security solution. Well, how does that $10K ransom strike you?
This may sound like nothing more than a horror story, but in reality, this happens to business owners all over the world each and every day. An IBM security study from last December discovered that over half of businesses surveyed had paid over $10,000 in ransomware payoffs, with 20% paying over $40,000. And that does not include the millions of dollars of damage caused by other forms of malicious software every year.
The fact is, when your time, money and business are on the line, it simply doesn’t pay to be cheap when choosing your cybersecurity technology. Think of it this way. With your free antivirus, you might be “saving” $100 a month. Lo and behold, a virus manages to punch its way through and causes chaos throughout the company network. Even if you’re lucky and it isn’t ransomware, by the time you’ve managed to expunge the stubborn virus from your business, you’ll have put in countless man hours, guaranteed to cost you more than that $100 a month. Instead of throwing those thousands of dollars down the drain, you’d be better off giving each of your employees a $1,000 bonus!
Free antivirus software, giveaway cyber-protection, or a $75 firewall seems like a great idea, until a hacker cuts through your company’s defenses like a warm knife through butter. These guys love when they see outdated, cheapo barriers guarding your priceless data — those are the paper-thin defenses that keep hackers in business.
You wouldn’t buy a rusty, secondhand old lock for your house, so why are you installing primitive cybersecurity software to protect your most precious company resources?
In today’s world of rampant cybercrime, it’s inevitable that somebody will come knocking at your digital door. When that day comes, do you want a free piece of software that you saw on LifeHacker, or a tried-and-tested, up-to-the-minute, comprehensive security solution?
Don’t be shortsighted and risk everything just to save a quick buck. Invest in your company’s future, and protect yourself with the most powerful tools on the market.
“The fact is, when your time, money and business are on the line, it simply doesn’t pay to be cheap when choosing your cyber security technology.”