Technology for MSMEs: Technology adoption has gained mighty significance for MSMEs over the past many years while Covid only reinforced the dire need for such businesses to evolve their operations technologically. Consequently, the adoption has been able to gain pace across back-end and front-end or consumer-facing operations including software for managing supply chain, sourcing of goods, managing warehouse, tracking goods delivery, automating shopfloor, customer service, websites or apps, etc.
While October is globally marked as the National Cyber Security Awareness Month to build cyber resilience, small businesses have largely been unable to build strengths in cyber security. In fact, the belief across micro and small businesses is that they aren’t big enough to be targetted by hackers or spammers. For most SMEs, cybersecurity starts with a firewall and ends with an anti-virus solution. This makes it extremely easy for attackers to enter their network. Many small businesses so far have been looking at cyber security solutions mostly as add-on costs less relevant to the business.
According to a Cisco report on cybersecurity for SMEs publish in September this year, cyber-attacks had cost over Rs 3.5 crore for two in three (62 percent) SMEs in India. In fact, for 13 percent of these 62 percent SMEs, which sustained cyber-attacks, it costed them over Rs 7 crore while overall 74 percent SMEs in the country suffered a cyber-attack in the past 12 months. Business and IT leaders with cybersecurity responsibilities at over 3,700 SMBs across 14 markets in the Asia Pacific region were surveyed in the report.
In terms of the type of impact, 73 percent of Indian SMEs claimed they lost internal emails, 71 percent lost employee data, 74 percent suffered loss related to intellectual property, and 75 percent claimed financial information loss. In addition, 73 percent of those said it disrupted their operations, 76 percent admitted it negatively impacted their reputation, while over 70 percent suffered a loss of customer trust.
“I see this to be very similar to proactively buying insurance to cover ourselves and our family from the unforeseen circumstances rather than waiting for a particular incident to happen. SMEs owners or CEOs should take control of their enterprise security and ask a few critical questions to the CIOs, CISOs, or IT Leaders of their enterprises that whether the company is cyber security compliant, are the technologies being used optimally, what is the organizations ‘Security Posture’, more importantly, what critical business assets do the company need to secure,” added Desai.
For many, the prime challenge has been around a lack of awareness about the right security tools beyond just anti-virus or firewall. The challenge is also around the lack of centralized cyber security management even as employees have to be made more aware of the digital security of the company’s data by avoiding unwarranted ads, pop-ups, and malware. The need for enhanced awareness around cyber security gains further prominence as data has increasingly been regarded as new oil or gold. “Today it is said that data is the new oil. I will also add that data is the new gold.
Reference: https://www.financialexpress.com/industry/sme/msme-tech-cyber-security-awareness-month-why-msmes-must-step-up-digital-efforts-to-secure-future-growth/2359014/
