Ah yes, the classic line from small businesses: “We’re just a tiny fish, why would hackers bother with us?”
But the data shows a startling reality: 41% of small businesses were victims of cyberattacks in 2023. The truth is, hackers actively target the little guys precisely because they bank on SMBs having slim security.
The struggle for MSPs trying to protect their SMB clients is real. Skilled security professionals are in high demand and expensive. Meanwhile, attackers are bypassing traditional defenses by, instead of using malware, mimicking legitimate IT activities within systems. They’re hitting cloud infrastructure and exploiting identity. And to top it off, they’ve pivoted from stealth to speed, making fast response capability an imperative.
“I think the mean time now is about an hour and 12 minutes for a hacker to access your data if you fall victim to a phishing attack. That’s really fast. So speed is of the essence,” says Redha Morsli, CEO of FSi Strategies, an MSP specializing in Microsoft technologies. Morsli has watched the attack landscape intensify in recent years as cloud and hybrid environments have become the norm.
Compounding the issue, organizations tend to use a patchwork of disjointed, non-integrated security tools. And the more tools an org uses, the worse off they actually are—organizations using more than 16 security tools actually face nearly three times more security incidents.
“What you really want is less tools with more capabilities,” says Morsli. “If you’ve got too many tools doing the security work, it’s going to be much more likely that something’s going to slip through the cracks because unless they’re from a single platform like Microsoft, they’re not integrated.”