Securing Your SMB: Benefits of Strong Cybersecurity Measures

Cybersecurity is essential for every business—full stop. As a small or medium business (SMB) you might believe cyber incidents are only concerns for global enterprises, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. According to Security Magazine over half of SMBs have experienced a breach—a third of which were in the past 12 months. But that’s not all.

According to Forbes, SMBs are often targeted due to their perceived vulnerability and lack of resources to invest in robust security measures. Therefore, strong security measures to mitigate these risks and protect operations are imperative. By implementing security measures such as firewalls, intrusion detection, and access control, SMBs can reduce the risk of data breaches and cyber incidents. In addition, strong security measures can help SMBs address regulatory compliance requirements. Ultimately, if you take proactive steps to protect your systems and data, you can avoid downtime, maintain customer trust, and focus on doing what you do best.

In this blog post, we will discuss the benefits of strong cybersecurity efforts and how they can enhance resiliency for resource-constrained SMBs such as yours.

Four key benefits of strong security

Amazon Web Services provides solutions that allow you to securely manage your most important data offsite without the cost of on-premises servers. If you’ve ever experienced a denial-of-service issue on your website or data security breach, you know how they can impact your daily operations. Here are a few key benefits you get when running your SMB’s operations in the cloud:

1. Designed to protect business data: Strong security measures such as encryption, access control, and data backup can help protect business data from unauthorized access, theft, or loss. This enables a business to continue to with minimal disruption and maintain customer trust.

2. Confidence to innovate and move quickly on a secure foundation: If you lack in-house cybersecurity or IT teams, you can work with AWS Partner Network consultants to help you innovate securely at scale in AWS Cloud. Take a closer look at what a strong cloud foundation looks like for SMBs such as yours.

3. Improves customer trust: At AWS, we consider security our top priority and believe this has earned us a significant amount of trust with our own customers over the years. Robust security measures demonstrate to customers that we take your data privacy and protection of your data seriously. For SMBs, this can cascade down to your own customers who might demonstrate trust and loyalty if they feel their data is secure with your company.

4. Saves money: Preventing security incidents saves lost revenue, legal fees, and reputational damage. Additionally, insurance premiums may be lower for organizations that demonstrate a strong security posture. Investing in strong security measures can help save the business money over time. For budget-constrained SMBs this is a clear benefit.

What AWS Cloud security offers SMBs

AWS provides a range of security services and features that can help you protect your business data and infrastructure.

Strong, global infrastructure

AWS Global Cloud Infrastructure is built to be the most secure, extensive, and reliable for all your applications. Security at AWS starts with this core infrastructure. Custom-built for the cloud and designed to meet the most stringent security requirements in the world, our infrastructure is monitored 24/7 to help address the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of your data.

Scalability

This means that SMBs such as yours can easily add or remove AWS security measures as the business grows or changes. One example of this scalability is AWS Security Hub. It is a cloud service that performs security best practice checks, aggregates alerts, and enables automated remediation. With just a few clicks, you can begin aggregating findings from many different AWS security services into Security Hub and conducting security checks.

Automation

Forbes found 83 percent of SMBs are not financially equipped to recover from a cybersecurity issue and 43 percent do not have any cybersecurity plan in place. AWS security services and features are highly automated, enabling SMBs to easily manage and take actions to help mitigate risk quickly, inexpensively and using as little power as necessary. Whether you’re fortunate enough to have an in-house IT expert or work with a third-party consultant, consider automating security with the following services:

• Amazon GuardDuty is a threat detection service that continuously monitors your AWS accounts and workloads for incidents and delivers detailed security findings.
• You can choose to either remediate findings manually or to implement security response automation using a combination of services such as AWS Security Hub and Amazon EventBridge. Automated Security Response on AWS is an example of an AWS solution that implements an automated security response mechanism within your AWS account.
• Yet another easy-to-use service is Amazon Inspector, an automated vulnerability management service that continually scans your AWS account for software issues and unintended network exposure.

Cost-effectiveness

SMBs can invest in strong security measures without significant funding because AWS security services are cost effective. In fact, several AWS security services are completely free, like AWS Identity & Access Management (IAM) and AWS Organizations. These services allow you to manage access to specific apps or workloads within in your cloud as your business grows.

Several other services offer free trial periods so you can try before you buy:

• Amazon Macie is a data security service that uses machine learning and pattern matching to discover and help protect your sensitive data.
• Amazon Detective simplifies the investigative process and helps you conduct faster and more effective investigations.

Compliance support

Do you work in a highly regulated industry such as healthcare or financial services? AWS Cloud regularly achieves third-party validation for thousands of global compliance requirements (including GDPR, HIPAA, PCI-DSS and over a hundred more). This can help SMBs address compliance needs with relevant regulations and standards. Avoid the need to manually collect, review, and manage information with AWS Audit Manager. It’s a service that helps automatically collect evidence, monitor your compliance posture, and proactively reduce risk.

Next steps

AWS provides a range of security services and features that can help SMBs maintain a strong security posture while saving time and resources. Investing in strong security measures not only enhances resiliency and efficiency, but also improves customer trust and loyalty, leading to increased sales and revenue.

Are you ready to see how AWS Cloud can help your SMB secure its most critical data? Our team can help you determine your biggest security opportunities, uncover the tools that will grow with your business, and oversee a seamless migration to a secure cloud. Contact us or learn more with AWS Smart Business.