Small- and medium-sized businesses can be victims of digital attacks as much as global ones can. In fact, 88% of small business owners think they’re open to a cyberattack. In response, startups must allocate time and resources to getting the right small business cybersecurity measures, right? If only business realities were that simple.
Let’s talk about startup culture for a second. What do you envision when you hear ‘startup’? Mark Zuckerberg, Silicon Valley, cold brew on tap, standing desks and a race to the finish line? You probably don’t think about late nights obsessing about small business cybersecurity. And therein lies the problem.
The Issue With Small Business Cybersecurity
There seems to be a conflict between the culture of startups and best practices for strong security. Security experts have been shouting this mantra from the rooftops for a while now: We need digital protection built in from day one. But that doesn’t sound very appealing to startup founders.
Instead, startup founders want to inspire their employees. They want to help them dream about what their product can do for the world and they want to beat their rivals. They want to rush forward and build now, think later. There is a lot of pressure to deploy software overnight and fix bugs later, but later never comes. This mindset of nudging developers away from caring about security and letting the experts handle it might be hurting them in the long run. When the most important job is to innovate without thinking about small business cybersecurity, startups only add to the already growing attack surface.
