How much is your business worth?

Could you put a monetary value on your business?  

First off, how is a business actually valued? There is no single number, but a handful of tools come up again and again. Buyers and advisers look at the strength and loyalty of your customer base, your turnover and your profit, the future prospects of the business, and the volatility of the market you trade in. Add in your assets, your reputation, your people and the contracts you have in place, and a picture begins to emerge.

If you have taken the time to work it out, it might well be worth more than you expected. Years of effort, relationships and reputation add up to something substantial.

Would you bet it all on a roulette wheel?

Now imagine going to a casino where you are forced to bet the value of your business every single day on a roulette table with a 50:50 chance of success. Win, and you get to trade for another day. Lose, and you lose some or all of your business.

That is exactly what it is like for businesses that use IT but do not take their security seriously, in a world of AI-powered security attacks. One in two businesses will experience an IT security breach. Those are the current odds, and it is a matter of when, not if.

Now imagine you are in the same casino, but this time you can change the odds. Your chance of trading another day moves from 50:50 to 80:20, or even 99:1, where an IT attack has minimal impact on your business. That is what investing in IT security does. It cannot guarantee that you will never come under attack, but it will minimise the chance and the damage an attack could bring.

Kill Godzilla while he is still a baby

Think of a security problem as Godzilla. When he is a baby and has not done much damage, he is easy to deal with. Ignore him, and he grows into a giant that destroys the city. A small issue such as a weak password or a missing update is far cheaper and simpler to fix early than a full-scale breach, with lost data, downtime, damaged reputation and recovery costs, is to clean up afterwards.

Hackers are like burglars but with better technology

The more you protect your business, the less likely it is to come under attack. Hackers behave like burglars: they look for the easiest win.

At home, you would not leave the front door unlocked, so why leave an unchanged default password on your router or firewall? You would not leave a window open when you go out, so why leave computers unpatched? You would not leave a bunch of keys lying in the garden, so why run computers without endpoint protection?

Home security does not stop at a good lock. You fit an alarm, perhaps a camera or a video doorbell, you lock the shed, you keep valuables in a safe, and you have insurance in case the worst happens. IT security works the same way. Strong passwords and multi-factor authentication are your locks, monitoring is your alarm and cameras, backups are your safe, and a recovery plan is your insurance.

Protecting the cloud too

Moving to the cloud does not remove the risk; it moves it. Your email, files and Teams conversations in Microsoft 365 are some of the most valuable assets you own, and attackers know it. The Silver Cloud Business has monitoring tools for Microsoft 365, so suspicious sign-ins, risky changes and unusual activity can be spotted and acted on before they become a problem, just like a burglar alarm that tells you someone is at the window rather than after they have gone.

Layers, not a single lock

No single tool will protect your business. Good security is layered, with each layer serving a purpose: a firewall to guard the perimeter, endpoint protection on every device, regular patching, email filtering to catch phishing, multi-factor authentication, monitoring and alerting, user awareness training, and tested backups. If one layer fails, the next is there to catch what gets through. The more layers you have, the lower the odds of an attack succeeding, and the better your chances of trading another day.

So just how much is your business worth?

So just how much is your business worth, and is it worth spending an extra few pounds each month to protect it?  Because if you don't value your business data, someone else will.

What does this mean for your business

The Silver Cloud Business can help you improve the odds. We start with an assessment of your current IT security, then give you clear recommendations on how to improve it, prioritised so that you fix the biggest risks first and build your layers over time.  The more you layer your security, the more your business is likely to survive in an AI powered security threat world.

Call us today on 01722 411 999.