Owning a website is one of the most important investments you can give your business. In this digital age, you hardly see people running a business without having a website.
However, building a website is easy but securing is one of the biggest challenges business owners face. Studies have shown that there is an attack every 39 seconds on average on the web and on average 42% of new websites are hacked.
The negative effects of breached website security are great no matter the size of a business. This is because, on the standard, it costs a company or organisation over $1.7 million to deal with the harms of a cyber attack.
This could rapidly shutter the doors of a small to medium-sized business within as little as a few weeks and could cause great harm to any business.
What is website security?
Website security refers to any action or protective measures taken by the organisation to ensure website data is not exposed to cybercriminals and threats or to avoid exploitation of websites in any way. This ensures your websites are protected from Stolen data, malicious redirect, season hijacking, and SEO spam.
Cybersecurity tops the list of online burdens for website owners and users alike. In recent years, large-scale data violations affecting major banks, businesses and retailers, and other top great service providers have made great headlines around the world. This has left users with more workflows than ever about the safety and security of sensitive personal data they share in the course of online transactions of all kinds. This has made many organisations invest in the right website security
Although If you run a small business or you are just starting one and you think you may not have the budget to secure your website, let me give you 10 reasons why website security is an important factor in the success of any business and why you should think seriously about it before it gets hacked.
- Protects your Data:
As the saying says, data is the gold of the internet. Visualize that one day you get to your company office, you open your laptop and you try to open your website and nothing happens, your search for possible issues and try to fix them and you couldn’t fix anything … you call your system admin and you were informed that you are the victim of a ransomware attack that influenced some kind of a vulnerability in the website. With this attack, all your databases are encrypted forever. How would you feel in this crisis? Believe me, this is not some kind of science fantasy film.
Recently, I heard of a business that has 5 years of analysis databases encrypted in a hard drive that lost its databases and reached out to a website security company for help. Fortunately, they were able to find a vulnerability in the ransomware that attacked him and he was able to get back the data. However, in most scenarios, this is not attainable, and once the ransomware encrypts your data, getting it back may not be possible.
Protecting your data and your client data should be the number one most important part of your business. You must not be careless in protecting them. That’s all that you’ve got, as your business success and growth are based on it.
- Protects your brand image
The most affected part of any business or company when a data breach happens is largely the brand image. Let’s be honest, if now you hear that some of the most available websites where you operate most of your online shopping have been hacked and a lot of credit card information has been stolen, will you trust them again to make any purchase from them.
Trust me, most people, including you If asked will have responded NO. Besides, that is very normal. How can you trust a company that does not take care of its most valuable client’s data?
Studies have shown and have been proved by breach companies that experienced a data breach have lost customers. The same research proves that those who had carried out some kind of security best practices and advice were able to reduce the impact of an inevitable data breach in their company.
Protecting your image should be your priority as a business owner.
Read also: 8 useful tips from experts in Website Security
- Prevents Loss of Sales
A hack can also lead to huge amounts of downtime and loss of productivity. This can cause loss to your sales and affect the business. Any business owner knows the importance of continuous sales to ensure the success of your business.
Furthermore, unprotected websites endanger not only the security of the company but also its validity since the loss of many sales could develop in the business having to close its doors for good. Relating to an article written by the famous magazine Forbes, amazon would lose almost, 4 million dollars every hour, if their website goes down for only one hour. This suggests that it is advisable to invest that money in making your website much more secure, rather than losing it on fixing things afterwards.
- Protects Your Proprietary Information/success secret
Most businesses create and own proprietary information, this includes applications and systems that are not accessible to the general public. An uncanny hacker could see a vulnerable website as a goldmine to penetrate your company’s operations. This could cost you a huge sum of money if your business secrets are exposed. They could also damage the valuable information on your website resulting in many damages which might not be accessible again leading to you starting from the ground up. This implies that all companies should make backing up their website a priority. Therefore, avoid this from occurring by properly protecting your website.
- Promotes Competitive leverage:
Investing in the necessary steps to protect your website can take you two steps ahead of the competition because a good secured website creates better business value.
This is because website security relatively decreases your risk of exposure while your competitors remain exposed to online threats getting their websites to get attacked all the time, endeavour to make sure yours is not one of them and securing it should be your goal.
Read also: Web development expectation vs reality
- Good ranking signal in google
Most businesses are not aware that website security is becoming a ranking factor for Google. Google is investing a lot of money in protecting its system for a favourable and more stable client experience. According to them, this investment has shown some remarkable results so they are now trying to make it general and make the web much more secure. Google is beginning to push webmasters to start accepting HTTPS as a default communication system between their backend and the client browser. However, I hope this motivates you that securing your website should be your top priority after business success.
- Prevents you from getting black listed
One of the top reasons that lead to any website being blacklisted by Google or any other company is being hacked. This is because one of the most modern hackers’ monetization techniques is to inject their ad networks into some malicious mobile applications and use the hacked website as a backend to receive and control those apps.
Once they get detected by google apple the first thing they do is extract the IOC where the hacked domain name is one of them and then they blacklist them quickly to get detected by other firewalls and robots.
I am sure you won’t want to be in a situation like this. No one wants to get into it, Because this can also affect your client’s trust and it is hard to gain it back after the damage.
- Gives You Peace of Mind
Running a business in any part of the world is hard enough without the endless worry of a cyber-attack. While you may not be able to stop all the hackers from operating, you can prevent them from attacking your company by setting protections in place that can stop them.
Have peace of mind in knowing your website is properly secured and that you are putting extra standards in place to protect what you have built. You can do this by putting a legal policy in place so that everyone in the company understands just how essential website security is a top priority for the business.
So, while the bad boys always pose a threat to your business you can reduce the odds of this happening to you by putting bold measures in place to secure your online presence.
Conclusion
In this digital age, website security is no longer a luxury but an urgency that can impact the survival and success of your business. And since cyber criminals and hackers are always searching for new ways to penetrate delicate company data, you must ensure that you protect your business with adequate website security systems to avoid damage and loss to your company. At soar digital, we can help you protect your website
