Growing organizations often seek out our help when they are struggling with issues like a downed server containing vital business data, a network infrastructure riddled with malware, or poor internet connectivity causing a loss of employee productivity. Of course, we’re eager to help. After all, it’s what we do! 

Do you allow your employees to check their personal email while at work? Are they permitted to use their work email addresses for shipping notifications from online retailers?

It's undeniable that cloud computing and outsourcing have resulted in better margins and higher profits for businesses over the past 10 years. However, data breaches have continued to plague companies around the globe with no end in immediate sight. This begs the obvious question: Could there be some relation between the two?

Social media giant Facebook recently announced 30 million users' personal information was compromised.

That’s terrible, right? Well, factor this: Facebook has 2.2 billion active user accounts, and the initial reports indicated the hack only impacted 90 million.

Most companies freely acknowledge that a data breach event would cause significant impact to their business. If a company processes, stores and accesses sensitive customer information (i.e. medical records, credit cards, social security numbers, etc.), it would also acknowledge that it already knows what types of data the criminals mostly like want to steal … or hold hostage.

Passwords do not receive the respect they deserve as a first line of defense against threats. Roughly 60 percent of confirmed data breaches involve weak, stolen, or default passwords. Most businesses provide little to no training for employees around selecting secure passwords, so it's no surprise that "123456", "password", "qwerty", and "Star Wars" are commonly used.