Whether you are a major corporation or a small business, money is what keeps your company going. Everything you do is geared towards attracting new customers so that you can make sales and have the money to pay your employees and suppliers. With so much business now completed online, any disruptions to your workflow or cash flow can make a big impact on your company. Here are a few ways cyber-attacks and other threats can affect your business and what you can do about them.
Downtime Online
If you suffer from an online attack through your website, then you will need to take all your stores and services offline while you investigate and bring in a
computer and digital forensics company to help identify the culprits. During this time, you will be losing money on the sales that you would have made. Putting in place robust procedures for identifying and stopping data breaches can reduce those incidents and hopefully reduce the amount of downtime as a result.
Consumer Confidence
With any security breach that involves loss of customers personal information, there will inevitably be a lowering of trust in your company. You may even suffer from loss of custom for a while as people wait to see the outcome of the breach. It is important to be open and honest about any loss of data, even if it doesn’t seem that any personal information was taken. You should also keep your customers informed of the process and what you are doing to resolve the issues. If you can show that you are putting strong procedures in place, it will
help to restore trust.
Disruption to Invoicing and Payments
If you are a small business, an attack on your company can cause repercussions to your financial stability. The loss of sales can lead to delay in paying invoices to your suppliers. When discussing security procedures with your staff and suppliers, try to put a plan in place to deal with delays due to the disruption in sales if a breach takes place. If your suppliers can see a clear plan in place, it will lessen the anxiety when something happens.
Staff and Salaries
The other issue that affects the smaller company is the risk to staff and their salaries. Smaller companies will have a finer margin when it comes to finances, so any downtime from an online threat will cause uncertainty among the employees. As with your customers, it is important to be
open and honest with your staff about any impact on the business. It may be that you can have a contingency plan in place for such events that will enable you to continue paying your staff while the disruption is remedied. Such plans will also give your workers some peace of mind and allow them to focus on getting the company back on its feet.
Planning and training are the best tools you can use to prevent cyber-attacks. Good planning can also help you to deal with any problems that occur if you are a target.