Small businesses in Australia are eagerly embracing cloud technology to capitalise on its ability to help them digitise and scale. This rapid migration to the cloud, however, has left many local SMEs without the right tools or infrastructure they need to properly secure their networks. More than one-third of Australian small businesses said they suffered cyber incidents primarily because their cybersecurity solutions were inadequate to detect or prevent an attack, and – alarmingly – another third said they did not have cybersecurity solutions at all.
Small businesses have also become more of a target because cybercriminals expect them to have less protection. This combined with the other issues that small businesses face – pandemic recovery, lack of resources, proliferation of remote work and IT security shortages – makes security seem insurmountable.
The only solution that makes sense in this complex new environment is automated cloud security. Security needs to be built in the cloud, for the cloud, to ensure businesses of all sizes can digitise quickly, safely, and securely. Here are four reasons why.
Existing security tools fall short
Existing tools weren’t designed to secure cloud workloads, and fall short when uncovering misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and threats. The Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) estimates annual losses to cybercrime are a whopping $300 million. Traditional security tools use rule-based models, which are time-consuming and notorious for producing false positives. Smaller security teams just don’t have the time or staff to create rules to scan against a list of known problems. Even for large teams, this approach isn’t scalable because of the sheer number of rules that need to be written. Organisations of all sizes need a way to continuously identify changes in their environment.
Do more with less
For small-business owners, an element of thriftiness comes as second nature. Machine learning enables small businesses to simplify cloud security at speed. By using a combination of continuous analysis and historical context, your security team can more easily reduce risk across all your cloud environments, without a lot of manual input. This empowers smaller organisations to see and understand cloud changes at scale without needing manual intervention by security teams. In this way, they can ‘level the playing field’ with larger organisations.
Cut through the noise
Migrating to the cloud can be daunting for small businesses – and rightly so – these are complex, multi-faceted environments. Recent research has shown almost four in 10 Australian SMEs have suffered cyber-attacks since the pandemic began. Intelligent machine learning takes millions of data points and distils this down into the most critical risks to digest and action. This means receiving a handful of only the most important alerts, instead of a ghastly number that is impossible to act on. Alerts can also be prioritised by severity and offered alongside context-rich recommendations so threats can be remediated quickly.
Avoid costly delays
Speed to market is fast becoming the defining factor of success. It is crucial to find and fix security risks early in the software development cycle, as vulnerabilities discovered later can cause revenue-impacting delays. With automated cloud security, your developers can continuously monitor for abnormalities and address vulnerabilities before code is deployed. They can also automatically uncover suspicious activity and emerging threats to nip issues in the bud.
Managing security in such a rapidly changing environment is challenging. Automation enables small businesses to simplify security at speed and be confident that their investment in the cloud not only builds their business but keeps it safe and secure as well.
