The cloud security industry kicks up a lot of numbers — cyberattacks, the readiness of small and mid-sized businesses, the loss potential, etc. And while those numbers may vary wildly, one thing is always true.
Businesses aren’t keeping pace with the threats they face.
For SMB owners, cybersecurity is just one task among many, and rarely the one that’s most urgent. Compare that to cybercriminals. They can spend all day probing your systems for vulnerabilities and build armies of bots and AI agents to keep the efforts going through the night.
The odds are never in your favor. The only option is to outsmart them.
What are the security benefits and risks of cloud hosting?
Cyberattacks have grown in strength and sophistication at an alarming clip — the Harvard Business Review cites a study showing an 89% increase in attacks by AI-enabled adversaries in 2025 alone. As tireless as the criminals are, however, the cybersecurity industry is just as relentless.
If you look at nothing but the number of updates you’re asked to install across your software and devices, you’ll see just how busy the good guys have been.
The first step to protecting your business is embracing the cloud. Whether in spite of or because of the attacks, hosting with a reputable cloud provider can still provide the safest location for company information. It’s certainly safer than a server stuck in a coat closet, which is what a frightening number of small and mid-sized businesses are running on. Cloud providers are in the security business, and they invest accordingly. Most businesses can’t dedicate the same resources, and thus don’t achieve the same levels of physical security, resilience, monitoring, and infrastructure protection.
What can a strong security posture do for your small business?
After this many world-stopping security breaches, most business owners know that cybersecurity is a critical part of protecting their business. Fewer understand it as a critical part of doing business.
Data breaches don’t just harm the company. They harm your customers. And as buyers of all sorts get increasingly aware of the risks poor security can pose, showing you take security seriously can be a differentiator. Sure, they want the service, information or good that you’re offering. They also don’t want to change their password. Prove you can give them both.
Then there’s the risk of downtime. Every second down is a second you’re not reaching your customers. Internally, it’s chaos. Externally, it’s crickets. Most people are not going to wait for you to collect yourself and get back online. They’re going to go straight to a competitor, or, just as likely, they’re going to forget they were ever in the market in the first place.
Winning customer trust in this environment isn’t just a matter of delivering what you say. Companies also have to prove that they care enough about customers to meaningfully protect their privacy. In this way, the security measures you take can start to become a competitive advantage, even for companies that aren’t in the cybersecurity business at all.
Why do cybercriminals target small businesses for sensitive data?
Small and mid-sized businesses make attractive targets for cybercriminals because there are a lot of them, they hold valuable information and they usually lack active monitoring or sophisticated defenses. All of it makes the effort-to-reward ratio pretty enticing.
The valuable information generally takes two forms:
- Customer information
- Company information
A breach involving either one can do lasting damage. Compromising customer information can break trust and create dissatisfaction and churn, as mentioned above. Worse, for regulated information like medical data and financial details, a breach can lead to legal action and increased compliance reviews.
If company information is stolen, however, it leaves a business open to all kinds of corporate skullduggery, some of which you may not know about until it’s too late.
Consider these 7 targets:
- Company Financial Performance. While QuickBooks Online may seem like a straightforward ledger, many financial planning tools like it hold sensitive company data that could cause disaster in the wrong hands. Hackers can find accounts receivable to target customers, salary information to poach employees, and any number of other secrets simply by getting access to one of these tools.
- Employee Email Addresses. A list of company email addresses is just a phishing scam waiting to happen, giving hackers the tools to know whom to target and whom to pretend to be.
- Intellectual Property. Coke doesn’t just need to keep a secret recipe under lock and key. Instead, it has to keep competitors out of lab tests, order histories, and other data sources that could compromise the competitive advantage. The same is true for any other business, whether you own processes or products.
- Bank Account Information. Bank robbers these days don’t chase trains. It’s much easier to gain account access and stage a bank heist from the comfort of your desk chair.
- Tax Return Data. Much like they do for humans, thieves with access to a company’s identifying information can contact the IRS and get your tax refund deposited into their bank account before you can even file your taxes.
- Patient and Insurance Information. Medical, dental, and psychiatric practices, hospitals, healthcare centers, nursing homes, and medical companies may all hold the personal medical information criminals need to commit fraud.
- Strategic Business Information. Stealing secrets isn’t limited to governments or to copyrighted material. Hackers may be after strategic plans, customer lists, or product development ideas to either use themselves or sell to third parties.
For each of these seven targets, there are probably 77 more hidden within your corporate files that can be sold, exploited, or shared to your company’s detriment.
Understanding the cybersecurity threats your SMB is up against
While cybercriminals have almost boundless creativity when it comes to hacking small businesses, threats usually fall into one of three general categories.
The first step to protecting yourself is understanding what you’re up against.
Malware, Ransomware, and Viruses
Of all the cyberattacks, ransomware is perhaps the most notorious. In a ransomware attack, a virus worms its way onto a computer and takes over, shutting everyone else out. Attackers demand a “ransom” to restore access to the hijacked data, but paying doesn’t guarantee recovery. Malware and viruses work similarly. They gain access to a computer, usually because of an individual lapse in judgment, then steal, delete, and/or corrupt the data they can find. These attacks work just as well on a single laptop as they do on a rack of servers or a global network. If valuable data is hosted there without a backup, you’re at risk. Even if the data is only valuable to you.
Spoofing, Phishing, and Deepfakes
Spoofing, phishing, and deepfakes all follow the same model, with increasing levels of sophistication. First, identify a person, website or app that’s trusted by your target. Then, pretend to be that person, website or app. Using your newfound identity, you can either encourage a person or system to download a virus as described above, or solicit the private credentials you need to access secured data directly. AI has made this problem an order of magnitude worse, with tools that allow people to fairly easily spin up a website or a voice or an app based on an original.
Brute Force and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks
While less newsworthy today than they once were, hackers can still cause a small business quite a bit of grief by simply overwhelming their systems. Orchestrated bot armies make it easy for anyone to pester a system at scale, whether it’s brute-forcing a password or spiking traffic so much the site or tool has to go completely offline.
Gartner found that 41% of chief information security officers surveyed reported at least one incident involving a deepfake voice on a call with an employee in the previous 12 months.
What cloud security measures does every small business need to take?
So… How do businesses protect themselves from becoming cyber victims? Like so many situations in life, forethought really counts. Here’s what you can do to minimize your risk.
1. List every asset cybercriminals may target, and your known security risks
Like photographing your treasures for a homeowners insurance policy, knowing what you have is the first step to securing it. Make a list of all of the cyber assets and sensitive data that you need to keep safe. Then prioritize them by impact on the business. This will give you a roadmap for your security measures.
As you list the assets, list the vulnerabilities as well. Update both of these lists regularly, by either manually scanning your systems or using software or a service provider to do it for you.
2. Back up your data. Then test your disaster recovery plan
A comprehensive security plan anticipates an attack. With cybercrime on a seemingly endless rise, every business should plan for the possibility of a security incident. The difference between a hiccup and a grinding halt comes down to the quality of your backups and recovery plan.
3. Always, always download the security update
The lackadaisical attitude you take to system updates on your cellphone cannot extend to your business systems. Whether it’s the task of a managed service provider or an internal employee, someone needs to be responsible for identifying system updates and security patches, testing them, and implementing them as fast as is reasonable. If the software provider knows there’s a vulnerability, the criminals won’t be too far behind.
4. Invest in endpoint protection and threat tracking
While most operating systems today come with some level of built-in threat protection, all businesses should use a centrally managed endpoint security program to protect laptops, desktops, and servers from malware and other threats. Look for a solution that can provide capabilities including behavioral detection, endpoint detection and response (EDR), threat monitoring, and automated response to suspicious activity.
If you can’t stop an incursion from happening, the next best thing is to know as soon as it does. Having the proper monitoring in place to alert you to a sudden spike in traffic, mass download or other odd digital behavior can be the difference between a minor event and a full-scale catastrophe.
5. Silo information with network segmentation
Even the smallest businesses can benefit from looking bigger. Network segmentation separates company systems, allowing only necessary communication. By restricting lateral movement, network segmentation forces would-be hackers to attack across multiple fronts to gain access to the entire company.
6. Consider dedicated servers to protect the most sensitive information
Some data is so precious, overkill is the only option.
Whether driven by regulation or extreme risk aversion, a business may want to take further security measures. While properly managed shared servers are extremely safe, a move to a dedicated server completely isolates your private cloud from other businesses, helpful for some compliance and application requirements.
7. When in doubt, disconnect
Networking provides incredible benefits to companies, letting employees work anywhere, anytime. Every connection is an opportunity for collaboration, and a risk. Bad actors can work their way into anything connected to the internet. No one wants to have to explain that the first point of entry was a smart refrigerator. If it doesn’t need to connect to the internet, don’t let it.
Once inside, hackers can hop from connected data set to connected data set. The more networked you are, the more risk you may be in. By segmenting and isolating your systems wherever possible, you can build firewalls that stop an attack within a single data set. The less it spreads, the less damage it does.
That includes your backups. Having a fully functioning replica of your data and systems doesn’t do so much if it’s connected to the same systems. Isolate your backups from your regular network, so if you are attacked, you can get back up again.
Turning your employees into the first line of defense against a data breach
The most sophisticated security systems in the world won’t help if someone forgets to lock the door. Despite the increase in volume and severity of cyberattacks, your biggest risk might be on your payroll.
First, the basics. Every employee needs a strong password, with multi-factor authentication enabled and automatic logouts for dormant sessions. Fortunately, most software allows you as an employer to set these requirements. Unfortunately, employees can still repeat passwords, write them down on sticky notes and store them on their phone. Providing employees with password management software like LastPass or 1Password can help you avoid some of these problems. But the true fix is education.
No one wants to sit through an outdated training video, but education absolutely has to be at the heart of any working security plan. Training sessions, test attacks — all of it helps, and every employee learns differently. Focus on the core cybersecurity principles, such as verifying senders and links, recognizing suspicious attachments, protecting credentials, and promptly reporting unusual activity.
Every day, cybercriminals are finding new vulnerabilities and new vectors of attack. Even the most well-protected environments can’t be 100% secure 100% of the time. In these cases, an informed and skeptical staff that can recognize and report suspicious activity is the line of last defense.
Small businesses were never meant to manage cybersecurity
Does the above list start your heart racing, or just start the dollar signs rolling? There’s no reason a small or mid-sized business needs to also stand up and run an IT business. Choosing a managed service provider that can run your private cloud, connect it to your public cloud, create your backups, and design your disaster recovery plan is almost always going to be more secure and more efficient.
Cloud service providers like Summit have a mix of physical and digital security that most businesses simply can’t match, plus full-time eyeballs on your systems and cybersecurity trends. When you let us do what we’re best at, you get to go back to focusing on what you’re best at.