Small and midsized businesses trounced by the years-long economic malaise are finally starting to invest in basic security applications such as antivirus and antispyware and devoting a good portion of their IT staff’s time to protecting their networks.
As Small Business Computing reports, this change of heart when it comes to data security is mostly a result of new state and federal laws requiring companies to do everything they can to secure customer data or else pay big fines when a data breach inevitably occurs.
SMBs on average spent $51,000 each on data protection last year, a figure that’s expected to jump considerably in 2010. Also, about two-thirds of each IT staffer’s day is devoted specifically to security-related issues.
Turns out that missing or stolen devices like USB drives, smartphones or laptops inflict a disproportionate amount of damage to SMB networks.
In the past year, small and midsized businesses have completed a rather remarkable about-face when it comes to how they prioritize and budget for security software and services needed to protect both their own and their customers’ most sensitive data.
According to a Symantec (NASDAQ: SYMC) survey of 2,152 executives and IT administrators at companies with between 10 and 499 employees, the majority of SMBs are now making data security their top IT priority compared to just 15 months ago when the majority admitted they had yet to implement even the most basic data security technologies and policies and more than 33 percent didn’t even have basic antivirus software applications installed.
This sea change in organizational philosophy boils down to a matter of dollars and common sense.
