Hello and my best wishes to you for the coming year. In this and subsequent columns I am going to share my thoughts on how you can make a difference to your clients by identifying and addressing the most important cybersecurity threats facing businesses today.
According to the UK Government’s Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2021, 39% of UK businesses reported a cybersecurity breach or attack in the previous year. This might be a shockingly high figure, but it is actually down from 46% in 2020, reflecting the fact that, faced with the potential for large losses and GDPR fines, businesses are taking security and data protection responsibilities much more seriously.
Equally remarkably, over 80% of cyberattacks now come in via email. As other defences have improved, helped in no small part by the shift to the cloud, fraudulent email (particularly business to-personal email, which accounts for over 90% of these attacks) has become the number one security weakness.
I have worked in the channel for over twenty years, but my direct experience in cybersecurity stems from around eighteen months ago when I started working with StayPrivate to develop their channel proposition. Although not a cybersecurity product in itself, StayPrivate ensures that businessto-personal email stays private, thereby solving this important cybersecurity and data protection problem for SMEs and their customers.
Equally importantly, StayPrivate is an easy addition to any existing stack and provides partners with a straightforward opportunity to generate significant additional recurring margin.
Working with StayPrivate has given me a great vantage point from which to observe how the market is evolving and where vendors are failing to adapt to the challenge of ensuring that information remains safe as more and more business is being conducted online and our customers are, rightly, increasingly concerned about the risk of falling victim to online crime and what the consequences of that may be.
I look forward to sharing more with you on this over the coming year. I will begin next month with GDPR and how its introduction has changed not only businesses’ obligation but also consumers’ expectations around data protection practices.
Find out more by looking at www.stayprivate.com, emailing partners@stayprivate.com or talking with one of our distribution partners such as Zest4.