If you're a small business owner or a key member of an enterprise executive team, you want your firm to succeed. If you're a customer, you want to be treated well. Those goals are not diametrically opposed, but very often it seems that companies and customers are at cross-purposes.
ECT News Network recently gathered together -- virtually, that is -- five technology experts who did some hard thinking on some of the issues businesses and consumers confront on a daily basis, and valuable insights were the payoff.
Our roundtable participants discussed technology priorities for small businesses, trends driving enterprises, the importance of the customer, and the effectiveness of personalization in today's marketplace.
Contributors to the conversation were Laura DiDio, principal at ITIC; Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group; Ed Moyle, partner at SecurityCurve; Denis Pombriant, managing principal at the Beagle Research Group; and Jonathan Terrasi, a tech journalist who focuses on computer security, encryption, open source, politics and current affairs.
SMALL BIZ BUDGET PRIORITIES
For most small businesses, there's little wiggle room in budgets. Getting the most mileage out of limited funds often is critical not just to success but to survival. With the business environment constantly changing, what made sense for last year's budget might be an expensive mistake this year.
How can small business owners make the best budget decisions while keeping their focus on core business activities at the same time? It often seems like a precarious juggling act.
To provide some perspective on the latest budgetary challenges, our panel identified three things small business owners should consider in the budget-making process:
- Guarding against cyberattacks;
- Investing in the right technology; and
- Doing business online.
Take Cybersecurity Very, Very Seriously
Cybersecurity deserves a large chunk of many small businesses' budget allocations in 2020, based on our roundtable discussion.
"Cybersecurity is huge for small business, I think," said Ed Moyle.
"We're seeing increased attacks at the SMB -- they're a huge target. They also typically underfund, or don't fund, security efforts," he noted.
"The proliferation of ransomware, in particular, is very troubling," said Rob Enderle.
"Criminal hackers of moderate sophistication -- or less -- are increasingly targeting small organizations, often with ransomware, because these organizations have minimal information security infrastructure and are very vulnerable to data loss," Jonathan Terrasi pointed out.
"Economics clearly favor it: It is much more profitable for these attackers to extort a few dozen small organizations for a modest ransom than to attack one larger organization with more resources but more formidable defenses," he said.
One of the reasons many small businesses fail to take security as seriously as they should is the prevalence of the "it can't happen here" mentality.
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