The Small Business Cybersecurity Burrito Nightmare

Small business is where it’s at in the USA. With more than 28 million already operating, and half a million more starting up every single month, small-biz represents more than 60% of total job growth over the past two decades. Investors are taking note—and so are cybercriminals.

So why all of the black hat attention? When you get right down to it, the reasons are simple: lots of targets and generally weak IT security. This new scrutiny has created a scary new world for small business security teams, and brings with it, incredible potential for disaster.

Or, as I like to call it—the Small Business Cybersecurity Burrito Nightmare.

You’re probably thinking: Why the talk of burritos?

Well, it’s fairly well established that when you’re hungry, your judgement isn’t what could be called “rock-solid.”

See, when you’re hungry, you might want something to eat that is loaded with delicious, complex flavors, like perhaps a grilled chicken burrito with mango salsa and guacamole. But money may be tight, and you probably haven’t gone to the grocery store for a while. So you start to compromise. One thing leads to another, you’ve raided your cupboards and refrigerator, and now you’re staring down a kale and BBQ sauce burrito, squeezing your eyes shut and hoping everything is going to be okay.

This situation is just like trying to manage the IT security in many small businesses. Business leaders want good cybersecurity—but profit concerns, operational tempo, and competition create reasonable but dangerous distractions. The result? Security takes a backseat.

It’s a bad call, and one that more and more small-business leaders are waking up to, far too late.

While the problems of managing and securing your enterprise may feel overwhelming, the solution for most organizations is relatively simple: Security staff must, at a minimum, utilize tools that protect users and ensure file hygiene. They need to account for, manage, and monitor their endpoints while also ensuring people aren’t sticking thumb drives full of food-porn in their USB ports.

The simpler and more centralized this management console is, the better, because even small businesses with a couple hundred employees can have thousands of endpoints. IT marketing wonks use the term “single pane of glass” a lot to describe this approach, and it makes sense. It doesn’t matter whether you’re managing desktops, laptops, smartphones, or the Wi-Fi coffee maker in the executive break room, you want to be able to find everything quickly and easily.

Now, it’s fair to say that here at Interfocus, we have tools that can help keep you and your team eating real food—and avoiding late nights fueled by coffee and sadness burritos. LanScope Cat, a unified endpoint protection and security solution, can protect against threats from both inside and outside of your network. It has that magic pane of glass and allows your team to prevent, protect, investigate, and mitigate issues across your entire enterprise.

We not only give your security teams full visibility to their endpoints, but full control as well. LanScope Cat can even tell you what Jeff from Marketing is doing on that laptop of his. We can also tell you if he’s done things like turned off his antivirus auto protection, or installed three different spyware-enabled toolbars on his browser … again.

Now we’re not saying that you just need to run out and buy LanScope Cat … (we totally are saying that). But we’re also trying—through the use of literary devices like burritos and kale—to show you the value proposition inherent in not only our solution, but also in treating this small business burrito disaster thing like the real threat it is.

We’re not going to say everything is going to be easy, or that we’ll keep you from suffering through a peanut butter and tuna fish burrito now and then, but at least it won’t be because your network has fallen over under the weight of all of the malware on Jeff’s laptop. We can fix those problems. The rest of it, the business stuff, we leave that to you. Because hey—you’re awesome—and you’ve totally got this. Now go get something to eat.

(P.S. Buy LanScope Cat.)