It seems like only yesterday that a firewall and antivirus were all a small business needed to protect its data. By current standards, yesterday’s threats were slow-moving and predictable, and blocking them at the network perimeter kept their impact to a minimum.

But things have changed. The question is whether small businesses are keeping pace. A recent survey of 1,000 small businesses by Symantec and the Small Business Technology Institute found that small businesses are largely unaware and uneducated about information security risks and their economic repercussions. Twenty percent of small businesses surveyed have yet to implement simple virus scanning on email.

Unfortunately, even simple virus scanning on email won’t cut it in today’s business environment. Today, information is continually moving among employees, partners, and customers—few of whom operate within the controlled sphere of the small business network. Each endpoint represents a potential entry point for cybercriminals who are increasingly intent upon compromising sensitive information for financial gain.

At the same time, industry and government regulations have put small businesses under greater pressure to make sure that online business communications and transactions are protected and that information remains secure and available.

Clearly, the network is no longer the perimeter. Today, people are the perimeter. Consequently, information protection is no longer about protecting the network. It’s about protecting information wherever it resides.

Data, Near and Far
In the digital age, business data constantly flows among an expansive range of organizations and individuals whose security status varies. Small businesses are dependent on these interconnections for the performance of their business—for the on-time delivery of goods and services as well as their financial performance.

For example, salespeople might connect to the small business network through a hotel network. Guests access the Internet through the wired or wireless LAN. Mobile workers at kiosks check email and download attachments. Customers transact business online from home Internet connections and public wireless hot spots.

Valuable information is vulnerable to exposure over each of these connections. As a result, protecting information in such an environment requires the elimination of exposures not only inside the network but also across business boundaries. This includes endpoint enforcement through protection, configuration, and usage, as well as endpoint compliance—and that means securing all endpoints and all access points all the time.

Of course, simple user error can also put small businesses—not to mention their customers, partners, and employees—at risk for a security breach. For example, a government agency recently revealed that an employee’s laptop was stolen—along with personal information on a staggering 2.2 million active-duty military personnel.

While the repercussions of this event have yet to be determined, it has already been called one of the nation’s largest security breaches to date. And the potential magnitude of its impact underscores the often tenuous line between information protection and information exposure in the interconnected environment in which businesses and individuals live, work, and play.

Then and Now
What a difference a few years can make, particularly where the Internet is concerned. In 1988 the first Internet worm was launched. It spread to just 6,000 computers—of course, that represented one-tenth of all the computers on the Internet at the time.

By 1993, Internet traffic was expanding at an annual growth rate of nearly 342 percent. The following year, a virus writer took advantage of this growing communications phenomenon to spread malicious code and posted the Kaos virus to a newsgroup.

Those were the good old days. Where yesterday’s threats were noisy and visible to everyone, today’s threats are silent and often go unnoticed—by design. After all, with the current price of a successful adware and spyware install at somewhere between five and 20 cents a pop, stealth pays.

That’s not all. While earlier threats were indiscriminate and hit virtually anyone and everyone, today’s threats are highly targeted and regionalized. Cybercriminals are in it for the money now, unleashing quiet but sophisticated, modular malicious code aimed at perpetrating identity theft, extortion, and fraud.

In turn, the task of containing, managing, and protecting data has gone from challenging to being vastly more difficult, complex, and critical. Information protection has clearly moved far beyond network security and now extends to protecting data regardless of where it is.

After all, lose the data and you lose the business.

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