How Security Awareness Training Can Actually Save You Money

For a small business in Northeastern PA, you feel like you’re doing a decent job of protecting your computers. You’ve installed virus protection, created a password for your WiFi, and set up a spam filter for emails.

Besides, you’re just a tiny company. Who would want to waste their time trying to steal your information? Unfortunately, this is dangerous and flawed thinking. Today, the smaller the target, the easier it is for cyberattacks to be successful—and hackers know this.

IT security services from InnoTek Computer Consulting are one way you can ensure that your computers, network, and data are truly protected. In addition, we can also help mitigate the risk of your most significant security liability: your employees.

Whether it’s from falling victim to phishing emails, using weak passwords, or exposing information on social media, your employees can cost you thousands—if not millions—of dollars from data breaches. But that’s not all. Less obvious costs of not having employee security awareness training are lost time, lost customers, and reputation damage.

Security Awareness Training Prevents Lost Productivity

Any small to medium-sized business owner knows that lost time is lost money. When your networks are exposed to security risks that compromise your company’s proprietary data, it can cause your systems to go down, making your business unable to operate. Additionally, once the data breach is discovered, your employees may not be able to work until it’s contained.

And if you don’t think a cyber threat is of much concern to you, consider this fact: in the first half of 2021, there were 1,767 publicly reported data breaches, exposing 18.8 billion records.

In addition, preventable human errors expose more data than hackers, making employees your most considerable security risk. Giving your employees complete network security training can help stop those human mistakes that leak data.

Protects Your Brand Image

When your company falls victim to cybercrime and customer data is exposed, you are required by law to inform your customers of the breach. Thus, your brand image suffers. Customers depend on you to safely handle their personally identifiable information (PII), and since it’s the most stolen piece of data, you can lose consumer confidence in your brand.

Ruining your brand image contributes to 38% of data breach costs.

Solves Legal and Compliance Issues

Besides ruining your reputation with customers, there are often legal repercussions for data breaches and exposing customer PII.

Suppose you are in a field that has heavy compliance standards, like HIPAA for the medical field. In that case, your business can be exposed to hefty fines and lawsuits for not providing the proper security strategies that led to the data breach. The average cost for the healthcare industry for a data breach in 2021 is $9.23 million.

Helps You Serve Existing and New Customers

Ultimately, all three of these previous costs from not providing robust cyber security consulting for your employees lead to a loss of existing and new customers. Don’t risk high customer turnover, loss of future business, and a struggle to regain trust in your company. Or worse—get put out of business.

The Bottom Line? Don’t Go Without Security Awareness Training

Luckily, you can strengthen your security operations and reduce the risk of cyber threats—employee security awareness training. Employees with compromised credentials contributed to 20% of the data breaches in the first half of 2021, and the average cost for a U.S. business was $8.19 million per breach. So while employee training is an additional cost to your business, it’s far less than what it would cost if your company were exposed to a data breach.

About our Security Training

With security training from InnoTek, your team will experience a one-hour course that covers topics such as:

  • Phishing scams
  • Learning about PII
  • Internal and external threats
  • Strong passwords
  • Phone scams

Afterward, they’ll take a 20-question security assessment to ensure they understand and can apply the risk management principles they learned. In addition, we offer continued training through simulated phishing emails and monthly newsletters.

For IT Security Services in Northeastern PA, Talk to InnoTek Today!

Unless you have an extra $8 million sitting in the bank to handle a potential data breach, you can’t afford to lack IT security services that include security awareness training. InnoTek can help with managed security services that detect and respond to cyber threats and train your employees to be aware and prevent errors that lead to data breaches.

Talk to us at InnoTek today to see how we can help further protect you and your business!

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