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25 Percent Of Small Business Owners Are Out Of Their Minds

According to a study conducted by AT&T, fully one-fourth of small business owners don't bother to concern themselves with the security of their business's data. Chances are you and your organization do business with SMBs. Which means that it's your information that is being left unprotected. That should make you angry.

The results are really stunning. Not only do 24% of small business owners not care about security, 10% leave computer data completely unsecured. Further, 32% don't think using wireless data presents any security risks and 17% take zero precautions to guard against wireless security threats.

What's going on here? Has the message not gotten out? Mobile technology presents great security risks of all kinds. Security is the No. 1 concern of many enterprises the world over. Why do small business owners remain ignorant of the risks?

Says Ray Boggs, VP of small- and medium-sized business research at market research firm IDC, small businesses don't usually see themselves as online security targets. "These are cases in which ignorance is not bliss," Boggs said. "Threats are now highly automated and impersonal. Being small doesn't make you less vulnerable. You may be less visible than a big bank or government agency, but you still can be undermined by the bad guys."

There is hope, though. Fully 60% of small business owners do consider security to be important and, of those, 82% have taken precautions in the form of antivirus and spam filters. Another 65% agreed that backing up data in the event of a disaster is very important and 93% of them actually do so. Of that group, 47% back up daily, and 72% back up weekly. Only 7% back up their data off-site, however, with 73% backing up their data locally on CDs or hard drives.

"The fact that so few small businesses back up their data remotely is surprising because so many companies recognize the importance of protecting their data," said IDC's Boggs. "It's like flossing your teeth -- people, including me, know they should but just don't do it regularly. The key is to make the process routine, automatic, convenient, and painless."

Security is important, people. For large and small organizations alike. Just because you run a small shop that serves a local market doesn't mean your data is unimportant to someone. Customer data, in particular, is always valuable.

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