Should small businesses care about cybersecurity?

There seems to be a constant bombardment of alerts and articles landing in my inbox over the last few months of system breach after system breach, it really does seem like the future is going to be a challenging one for businesses when we are talking about protecting your businesses from this ever-expanding avalanche of attacks.

Many of these breaches or cyber security incidents are being targeted at Australia’s small businesses; this focus makes sense for several reasons firstly according to ABS small businesses make up 97.4% of the total number of businesses in Australia. What do they classify as a small business? Small businesses are defined as 0-19 employees with a count of 2,066,523 small businesses. A further 2.4% are classed as a medium-sized business (20-199 employees) and a final 0.2% classed as large (200+ employees). That gives us overall total businesses of 2,121,235 in Australia at the time of the ABS statistics.

With SMB’s taking up 99.8% of all Australian businesses, it certainly makes sense that they are a target of cyber criminals but let us look at just the small businesses who make up 97.4%, they have a small number of staff, a much smaller revenue stream than enterprise or even medium size organisations and the pressure on their budgets would make it hard for them to consider looking at a really strong cybersecurity program whether this is physical or software based protection or even just user awareness training initiatives to help educate staff.

This would reveal these small businesses as a great target for cybercriminals because protections would be less, they would not have dedicated IT/Security staff to protect their systems and if you really talk to these business owners, they are usually very pressed for time. Cybersecurity is something that they may be aware of but is right at the bottom of the list of their priorities.

Does that mean small business owners do not care about cyber security? No, I do not think it does, I feel that it is just put in the too hard basket and left at the bottom of that list.