Build Your Business: Turn Security into Opportunity

While small and medium businesses (SMBs) benefit from their agility and capacity for quick action, tight budgets and lack of in-house cybersecurity knowledge often challenge them to stay on top of the rapidly evolving threat landscape. According to Accenture’s Cost of Cybercrime Study, 43% of cyber events are aimed at small businesses, but only 14% are prepared for these incidents. Security risks are growth risks that are even more salient for SMBs, says Johanna Wood, Senior Solutions Lead, Worldwide SMB at Amazon Web Services (AWS). Any business can suffer catastrophic effects from a security event, but SMBs are particularly vulnerable. The fall out of these cyber events can include severe financial consequences. According to the 2021 Data Breach Investigations report by Verizon, the median cost of a cyber event was $11,150 while the range in losses for 95% of the cases fell between $70 and $1.2 million. These events can also harm reputation, impact pricing strategy, productivity, staff morale, and the potential to innovate–all major factors that can hamper business growth. The risks are real, so having an adaptable security strategy plan is essential.

As businesses implement their digital transformation strategy and integrate cloud-based tools, cloud security must equally be a part of the strategy. Many businesses continue to struggle with dozens of security tools in an ongoing attempt to achieve compliance. A proliferation of tools is often a major time sink that also risks user error. Cloud-based security solutions can streamline threat detection, help guard against cyber events, and help align with security standards without placing extra demands on a team’s attention and energy.

Advanced threat detection and prevention

Cloud-based security solutions can provide SMBs with robust threat detection and prevention capabilities. Cloud-based firewalls and intrusion detection systems can monitor incoming and outgoing network traffic, helping to identify and block potential events in real-time. Advanced technologies, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, can analyze vast amounts of data to detect anomalies and help identify potential cybersecurity threats before they can cause harm. Cloud-based security solutions also centralize security monitoring and management, making it simpler for SMBs to oversee their cybersecurity status more holistically.

Wallester, a licensed Estonian Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) SMB, was eager to create a scalable and easy-to-use payment system that would offer its partners modern financial services at affordable rates. Creating Wallester’s own data center would require substantial financial investment and resources to manage and keep it running. The company worked with AWS to build a secure, scalable, and reliable BaaS environment that could seamlessly expand in multiple regions while keeping costs low. As a result, Wallester saw a 5x growth in revenue year-on-year and it allowed the business to launch a new product, Wallester Business, to revolutionize how organizations manage corporate expenses.

“Cloud services really open up technologies to SMBs that were traditionally used by enterprise-level firms,” says Wood. “Most of the services on AWS are pay as you go, so customers only pay for what they use. This allows a small business to use the same technologies at a fraction of what a larger organization would pay purely based on how much they are consuming.”

Meeting certification standards

Companies that use backup services or cloud storage may run into compliance issues. Forty-four percent of IT decision-makers regard compliance to be their most challenging cloud concern according to IDG research. Cloud service providers build their data centers to meet various security controls and compliance frameworks, which mitigates the complexity and high cost of meeting certification standards, says Wood. “We provide customers with artifacts and evidence via a simple self-serve portal, which can then be handed to those seeking security, risk, and compliance proof.” SMBs can then focus on managing and securing their applications and data to the levels required.

For DeepThink Health—a health-tech environment that de-identifies and curates complex and unstructured health data into actionable insights for healthcare providers and life science companies—cloud tools have helped the US-based company scale while maintaining accuracy and precision securely. Before working with AWS, it took the company a minimum of three months to procure hardware and software, set up the systems, and deploy applications to scale up. Now DeepThink Health can scale up and down within minutes, and since adopting cloud security, has declared zero data breaches, achieved monthly uptime above 99.9% and met the highest standards for health data protection including HIPAA and HITRUST CSF certification.

Security supports growth

Cloud technology can provide SMBs with scalable, secure and reliable to run any workload that historically was only accessible to firms that could bear the high costs of procuring and maintaining this type of infrastructure. Cloud-based tools can help keep SMBs up-to-date with the latest security patches and software updates, saving them the precious time and resources of patch management. By lowering operating expenses and minimizing downtime, companies can invest further in growing their business.

The AWS Security Hub has transformed the way that weetrust, Mexican legaltech experts with presence across Latin America, manages security and compliance across its entire infrastructure. By automating threat detection and remediation, the Security Hub helped weetrust make data-driven decisions faster than its previous manual and reactive security processes. Running workloads on AWS minimizes the need for upfront investments in infrastructure and allows for the agility to explore cloud technologies and opportunities to innovate within your business. “AWS secures the physical infrastructure [SMB] applications and data run on. That includes hardware, network, and the facilities. This makes it simpler and cost effective for small businesses to run applications in AWS as compared to running applications in a data center where they’d be responsible for securing and maintaining these assets,” adds Wood. “This allows SMBs to focus on protecting their applications and data.”

weetrust needed help building a powerful IT infrastructure from the ground up in an industry that relies on trust. By partnering with AWS, weetrust has been able to focus staff efforts on its core business without having to spend extra time worrying about managing servers and data centers. This has empowered weetrust to grow and scale quickly and affordably while building trust among its customers by integrating the highest security measures into its infrastructure.

Managed security services

Cloud-based security service providers offer managed security services that can help SMBs enhance their cybersecurity posture. These services typically include monitoring and responding to potential security incidents, threat intelligence, security assessments, and vulnerability scanning. Some security partners provide 24x7 security protection and monitoring of AWS resources delivered as a fully managed service, says Wood. “AWS has established a competency so customers can easily identify which partners meet AWS’s baseline standard of quality for managed security services providers (MSSPs). Some MSSPs offer free trials and competitive pricing for SMBs.” SMBs can benefit from the expertise and resources of these security service providers, who can provide proactive monitoring and mitigation of cybersecurity threats, helping SMBs stay protected against evolving threats without having to invest in extensive in-house security capabilities. “The biggest benefit is the confidence in knowing you're protecting your business while aligning with security and compliance requirements for applications and data,” Wood explains. “This includes data locality, protection, and confidentiality with the comprehensive services and features AWS offers.”

Refining your focus beyond security

SMBs are often looking for tools and solutions that are simple to use and provide concise recommendations that are cost effective, says Wood. “Usually, the adoption barrier is that there are too many tools and solution options and it’s hard to know which one will meet their specific needs. SMBs do not have to take this on themselves. There is a vast AWS Partner Network (APN) to find IT service partners with security competencies that can do assessments, remediation of findings, and deploy AWS cybersecurity applications and establish best practices.”

AWS has been focused on helping SMBs understand which solutions will be the best fit for their unique needs through its Smart Business Hub and AWS SMB Solutions Library. However, human error is still very much the driving force behind an overwhelming majority of cybersecurity events. The Stanford University “Psychology of Human Error” study estimates that 88% of all data breaches are caused by an employee mistake. Automated technologies that monitor and detect potential threats can help, but educating staff on security best practices is very important, says Wood. “Some examples of security best practices are to teach them how to inspect an email and verify the sender is authentic, to never click on unsolicited links from unknown senders, using strong passwords, and providing guidelines on how to protect sensitive and critical data.”