Pete Nicoletti, Field CISO Americas, Check Point Software
If you’ve been heads down and focused on the challenges of running and growing your business, you may have missed all the latest security breach news: from Microsoft, to OKTA and Samsung… all breached recently by the Lapsus$ group. Add to that, the Russian-Ukraine war that is producing more warnings and attacks on the US infrastructure.
As a small business, you may think your organization is not a target…but think again. Your “virtual front door” on the internet is 500 milliseconds away from every hacker in the world. Hackers now target smaller companies that don’t have all the protections, staff, monitoring or awareness that larger enterprises have.
Business owners: It’s time to pay attention.
As a small business owner, partner or key employee, you’re probably aware of the challenges in achieving “Enterprise Grade” security: not enough money to buy the best gear, not enough expert staff to manage, monitor, maintain that gear, and not enough time to figure it all out!
The good news is…the situation is changing.
When you think of enterprise grade, you probably envision large, black, rack-based, blinking lights, loud fan-spinning boxes that cost a fortune, need lots of care and feeding and have way more features, and horsepower and that cost more than you need. For large companies with a couple hundred servers to protect in a data center, the big boxes make sense.
However, small businesses may only have a single location or maybe two, with dozens of employees that need all those advanced enterprise grade features, while deploying easily all with reasonable price tags. Moving outward from the office location, it’s not just servers at your small business that needs protection, now, you must consider key employees home computers and networks security.
Small businesses also face the similar challenges with their cloud deployments. You may need extensive featured solutions for security and compliance monitoring, but the native cloud provider controls are just not good enough. And finally, you know you need to secure your laptops and cell phones, you’re aware of the free tools, but the most capable tools are expensive, hard to deploy and need an army to manage.
As a business owner, partner or key employee, you know you want to protect your intellectual property, keep your client information private, avoid costly disruptions and certainly don’t want your reputation ruined with a security event.
According to Check Point Research, here are your top SMB threats in order: Phishing, Malware, Credential Theft, Ransomware, remote access breach, and finally insider threats. How do you protect against all these risks on a slim budget? It’s now possible with the latest tools from Check Point and their partners.
Check Point started the firewall industry almost three decades ago with the world’s first stateful firewall and has been growing and offering new products since then. Check Point secures the largest international companies, banks, governments and demanding enterprise customers, but also addresses your small business security challenges, (while you are on a budget).
Here is each typical small business risk area, and what you can do now:
1. Home Sweet (insecure) Home: During the pandemic, you had to support the migration from work locations to home-based access for your employees very quickly. There was no time to consider if the home Wi-Fi was secured, or if the network they are using is shared with the kids and neighbors who surf everywhere and can intercept communications. Of course, you trust your employees, but you have no way of enforcing reasonable security since you have no budget, time or expertise to deploy all the protections you should have.
Check Point is now offering a full range of home and small business-based firewalls called “Quantum” with secure Wi-Fi that include ALL the extensive features and advanced capabilities of their largest “Enterprise Grade” appliances. The appliances can be installed in minutes, monitored with your Cell phone and are designed to “prevent” issues rather than just “detect” them. Check Point is well known as having the easiest console to manage as well as most capable console. Additionally, they have had the least number of vulnerabilities and when that occasionally happens, Check Point leads the entire industry in response time to fix. No one else is close.
2. Laptops: As above, you probably rushed to support remote workers and you may have thought that you were saving money by allowing your employees to use their laptops to access your business. What the statistics prove out is this is this is not the best financial, or secure decision. BYOD Laptops may be shared with other household members, the OS may not be patched, and the business owner has no way to enforce security policies like: preventing exposure of your company secrets and preventing private docs from being shared, or preventing corporate password reuse, or clicking on a malicious www URL.
Check Point has the world’s leading end point security tool called Harmony and since you don’t have time to read and study MITRE ATT&CK competitive reports, and study the analysts opinions you only have to look at the top performer on everyone’s list: Check Point.
3. Cell Phones: As with laptops above, your employees want convenience and no one wants to carry two phones. What is the small company owner to do?
With Check Point, the world’s best cell phone security tool and Mobile Device Manager (MDM) is within your budget. Fast, easy deployment, full features and full policy enforcement is available.
4. Email and Cloud Based Apps: This is still one of the leading vectors of compromises and must be addressed fully as the costs of compromise are ridiculous. Most small businesses have outsourced their email to one of the leading SAAS providers like Office 365 or Google as its cheaper, feature rich, easier to manage and has great availability and uptime. But, there is a dirty little secret: The current provider tools and typical Mail Gateway protection tools are no longer good enough to prevent threats from being delivered into your users inbox. You can spend money on training your users, but you can’t depend on your employees to be your last line of defense.
Check Point has the #1 rated and fasted growing email protection tools available. For those businesses using SAAS and Cloud Based Apps, Check Point has the most extensive lineup of tools to secure your email processes wherever they are.
5. Servers in co-lo or broom closet: As a small business, you make the best decisions you can at the moment. You may have decided to buy a server(s) that could be compromised…and it needs care and feeding daily: keeping up with patching, monitoring the host-based intrusion prevention and implementing and enforcing least privilege and Active Directory Management.
Quantum Spark not only has a cool name, but it’s easy to deploy and manage with out-of-the-box Zero-Touch provisioning and a user-friendly mobile app for threat mitigation on the go. It’s an “all in one” solution SMBs need that combine security and optimized internet connectivity; Wi-Fi, GbE, VDSL, & 4G LTE, performance-based routing. Their servers are easily protected: Wherever they are, running in a corner of your office or in a physically secure co-lo, you can get Enterprise Grade security in no time at all.
Running a small business requires dealing with as immense number of issues from competition to scheduling, to payroll, banking and collections and the new one: supply chain issues. But, once you add security challenges to all the above, it is just too much to handle: No security expert on staff, the need to monitor 24/7, compliance reporting requirements and the desire and goal to have security as a competitive differentiator. Small business owners need help…and getting enterprise grade security for your small business is just a phone call or web browse away.
Now is the time to reach out to Check Point or one of its thousands of partners to get help. Check Point solutions are affordable, available and in stock today and can prevent costly security issues and the resulting total makeover and improvement of your security posture will give you piece of mind and ultimately save you money.
For further information on Check Point SMB security, please visit this page.