From marketing firms to manufacturers, security is high on the priority list for all organizations these days. Keeping your business safe is not only a matter of investing in physical security; it also means taking care of your cyber security. This is often not just a matter of protecting your own proprietary information or keeping your systems safe from viruses; there are often regulatory compliance requirements related to things such as HIPAA, FISMA and PCI that require you to protect sensitive data and to track and control access to it. Not doing so can be a costly affair, with HIPAA breaches resulting of fines of $50,000 and above, for example. IT compliance is thus not negotiable.
Opting for business computer services can help you ensure that your systems are secured and protected as best they can. According to a 2015 study by the Ponemon Institute, each breached record cost about $217 in 2015 and the total average cost per breach rose to $6.5 million. Of all breaches across all types pf companies, most (80%) resulted from the use of weak admin passwords. In 2012 as many as 87% of small companies had some form of security breach and close to 60% of these had reported staff-related breaches. Since the greatest threat to an organization is actually internal — as much as 75% to 80% of all breaches are internal — using IT consulting services to perform security audits and penetration testing can be a crucial step in protecting your business. Close to 60% of employees who quit or are fired, take proprietary corporate data with them.
In fact, even the US federal government is not immune, suffering an almost 680% increase digital data breaches over the last six year. The problem continues to grow year on year; 2015 saw some of the most high profile and costliest breaches of all time. As a result companies are examining the business IT consulting options available to them in terms of managed IT services and security outsourcing.
It is easy to get on the wrong side of the data security divide as a business too. Marketing firms, for example, run the risk of being accused of sending spam mail — which in turn can be a source of virus infection or data breaches. These marketing firms need to ensure that they comply with the guidelines regarding sending email communication. Only 3% of the more than 60 billion emails sent every day are not spam and in fact close to 10 out of every 1,000 computers are infected with it.