Skill, labour, talent for MSMEs: Even as many businesses might have to resort to job cuts in order to reduce costs during hard times, not all of them have shown confidence in the safety of their data from misuse by former employees, said cybersecurity company Kaspersky on Wednesday. According to a survey commissioned by Kaspersky of 1,307 business owners and decision makers at small and medium-sized organizations across the UK, USA, Germany, France, UAE, KSA, Turkey, Indonesia, Thailand, India, Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia, only 50 per cent of SMB leaders were confident that their ex-employees don’t have access to company data stored in the cloud while 51 per cent were sure that former workers can’t use corporate accounts.
Amid a lack of confidence in former employees’ possible use of company data, job cuts by SMBs “may put the safety of data and company livelihood at additional risks. Ex-employees’ misuse of data in new jobs or to drum up business for themselves were major concerns for bosses,” the survey said. Moreover, 63 per cent of respondents worried that former employees would share the company’s internal data with new employers while 60 per cent said ex-employees might use corporate such as previous client databases to launch their own business. Overall, 31 per cent of respondents said they would consider reductions in employment as a possible measure to cut costs in case of a crisis.
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“Unauthorized access can become a huge problem for any business, affecting the competitiveness of a company when corporate data is transferred to a competitor, sold off, or deleted,” said Alexey Vovk, Head of Information Security at Kaspersky in a statement. This problem becomes more complicated when employees actively use non-corporate or “shadow IT” services which are not deployed or controlled by corporate IT departments, said Vovk.
In order to immune a business from the uncontrolled access of the company data to employees, Kaspersky suggested keeping control of the number of people with access to crucial corporate data, setting up a policy for access to corporate assets, including email boxes, shared folders, and online documents, regularly backing up essential data etc.
Lack of proper digital security infrastructure exposes small businesses to evolving cybersecurity threats, particularly with the rise in the adoption of cloud-based solutions and digital payments. A survey by Cisco in September last year had noted that cyber-attacks in the past 12 months cost over Rs 3.5 crore for two in three (62 per cent) SMBs in India.
The cybersecurity market size in India is likely to grow by 17.15 per cent during the 2022-27 period with 2022 revenue expected to be at $2.15 billion, according to data platform Statista.
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