Want to make sure that your employees are fully equipped as they work from home during the COVID-19 crisis? Do you need to make IT-related decisions to keep your business operational during this time?

It’s best to turn to IT experts to provide you with the proper guidance and assistance you’ll need.

Did you know that the average employee in a small company has about 85 unique passwords? That’s far too many passwords to remember! No wonder the same report found that employees reuse their passwords an average of 13 times or inevitably resort to using easy-to-remember but also easy-to-crack passwords.

Losing a great employee hurts. To begin with, finding top talent is costly and time-consuming, so losing them means spending time and money again on recruiting, hiring, training, and developing new employees. Failing to retain them also creates organizational issues such as reduced company productivity, increased workload on the remaining staff, and lower morale and feelings of job insecurity.

Are you aiming to grow your small- and medium-sized business (SMB) this year? It’s not an easy endeavor, but with the right support and approach, you can successfully scale up your company.

Here are some steps you can take to help you win customers, increase your profits, drive productivity, and ultimately move your company forward.

In 2018, the Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) showed that 81% of company hacking-related data breaches were due to compromised, weak, and reused passwords. The most recent DBIR report reveals that not much has changed, as stolen and weak credentials are still involved in 80% of hacking-related breaches.

Robust security tools are necessary and essential to any workplace. However, solely relying on them to keep your company protected is not enough. You also need to fortify the human element of your cybersecurity.

A Proofpoint report states that more than 99% of cyberattacks require human interaction (e.g., clicking on a link, enabling a macro, or opening a file). This shows that cybercriminals are targeting people more than IT systems and infrastructure “because sending fraudulent emails, stealing credentials, and uploading malicious attachments to cloud applications is easier and far more profitable than creating an expensive, time-consuming exploit that has a high probability of failure,” says Kevin Epstein, vice president of Proofpoint’s Threat Operations.

For the past few years, a week never seemed to go by without news of another data breach, malware attack, or hacking scandal. Unfortunately, cybercrime is projected to rise in this new decade, which will cost the world in excess of $6 trillion annually by 2021, double the $3 trillion total from 2015.

These numbers reinforce the importance of having robust cyber defenses, which a multilayered IT security strategy can deliver.