Online risks don’t only apply to big businesses, as reported by The Guardian, 74% of SMEs suffered an information security breach in 2015. This number is growing at an alarming rate and the cost of such breaches more than doubled between 2014 & 2015.

Why?

Quite simply, small businesses on the whole, tend to invest less time and money into their online defences, unwittingly allowing  their innovations, customer data and hard-earned online presence to become easy targets with relatively large payoffs in intellectual property and saleable information.

Prevention is ALWAYS better.

Your website is first and foremost the most publicly available digital asset you hold. Spending thousands of pounds on design and development to then let its security features lapse and ignore compatibility updates is asking for trouble! And there’s no good reason not to maintain your website.

For most platforms, checking in every 3 to 6 months is plenty to maintain integrity. There are also a number of third party applications, depending on the platform, which will alert you to intrusions, multiple login attempts, suspicious changes and software updates you should undertake.

It’s not an expensive affair – unless you wait until there’s a problem! A single WordPress installation would cost £40 plus VAT per month to maintain with Cybernautix if the maintenance plan was in place within 6 months of Cybernautix developing that website.

If, however, you’ve already been hacked and a developer has to come in to investigate, rebuild and secure your website – you could find yourself facing a bill as big as, if not bigger than, the original development fee.

Consider adding to that:

  • the opportunity cost for the time your website is blacklisted by Google
  • the damage to your reputation with existing clients who pop in to look up a product and find your homepage filled with entirely inappropriate content
  • the time a member of your team has to spend arranging a resolution

A monthly maintenance fee is starting to sound like really good value! Contact us for more information.