How to Address Security Overwhelm

Security Overwhelm Is Impacting Businesses

Many businesses are at the breaking point when it comes to dealing with security incursions. They are overwhelmed. Instead of spending their time expanding the business, generating sales, devising strategies, and developing new products, they find themselves inundated with security threats. Viruses, spam, ransomware – it seems that every day another user is infected, or another system compromised.

The situation has deteriorated even further during the pandemic. With so many people working from home, the attack surface has greatly increased. Whether it’s a home computer, a consumer-grade router, or misguided browsing habits, the work-from-home brigade suffer from breaches for more than when they were in a more controller office environment – and that’s saying something.

Before Covid-19 emerged, office workers fell victim to phishing and other scams at alarming rate. It was not uncommon for corporate email addresses to be hijacked and all employees to suddenly get a message from the finance department prompting them to provide their login and banking details. But regardless of how poor the security picture in the office appeared, it is much worse at home. A study by Deloitte revealed that as many as 47% of home workers fall for phishing scams. The average cost of the resulting data breaches is places as high as $137,000.

Balancing Security Technology and Profitability

Email security comes up again and again as a top concern among SMBs. Ransomware, too, is a big concern. But SMBs are at a loss as to how to find the time and resources to fix such problems. The more people they hire (if they can hire them at all) to work on IT security, the more hours managers spend trying to enhance security, and the more security tools they deploy, the lower their profit margins go.

In some ways, it is similar to looking after a home. Yes, a few DIY lovers happily spend their weekends with tools in hand. But most are either too busy, want to focus their attention on the family or the game, or lack the skillsets to tackle home maintenance. Thus, they bring in outside help to clean their houses, attend to the garden, and fix the gutters.

Similarly, in business, most companies want to spend their time on their core competencies. If they are a mortgage broker, they want to work diligently from 9 until 5 administering as many real estate transactions as they can. If their days are interrupted by having to disinfect all employee laptops, or worse, being locked out of all systems by ransomware, they don’t get work done and profits falter. Just like homeowners, they need outside assistance. 

Outsource Your Security Services

That’s where managed security services come in. Syxsense offers managed services to take care of some of the most critical areas in the fight against cybercrime – patch management and vulnerability scanning.

• Yes, internal SMB resources can manually review, test, and deploy patches across all servers and laptops. But that eats up a lot of time.
• Yes, the boss, or the assigned person responsible for IT, can watch YouTube videos on how to conduct vulnerability scans – you can also watch videos on how to fly a jumbo jet. But who would attempt it in reality?

Security, these days, is such a complex area that it requires highly skilled resources. Increasingly, those resources have become too scarce or too expensive for most SMBs.

Syxsense Active Secure is a managed service that takes care of automated patch management, vulnerability scanning, and IT management duties.

By turning over those functions to Syxsense, the company can focus its attention on core duties and create expansion – and perhaps even free up enough time to tend to the garden!

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Syxsense combines IT management, patch management, and security vulnerability scanning in one powerful solution. Get started today.