No website is immune from cyber-attacks or data breaches. No matter the size of the business, a data breach can be devastating for the company and their customers.
The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) estimates that over 2 million instances of cyber-fraud were reported by UK businesses in the past year, with 49,000 cases being directly linked to this. Read on to find out more about web security and why it's essential for your business.
Billions of people use the internet daily, signing up for content, purchasing products or services. People depend on the internet for lots of things and consequently hand over a lot of their personal information.
If you currently own an e-commerce website, your server may host customer payment information, addresses, date of birth and other confidential information. If a hacker gets hold of this information, it wouldn’t be hard for them to steal your customer’s identities and make fraudulent purchases.
It’s your duty to safeguard your customers from online criminals by prioritising your web security.
When your website gets hacked, it will likely be down for a while. It can take a long time to get back online whilst repairing a hacked website and even longer if your assets are also damaged due to viruses.
This loss of productivity will be damaging to your business sales and overall revenue.
Establishing trust with your customers has always been essential, but you could argue that it’s even more true in today’s digital world.
You may lose revenue from a lack of sales due to website downtime and loss of productivity, but you will most likely cause long-term harm to your business's finances from a damaged reputation. The moment that your customers find out you have fallen victim to a data breach, they will think twice about doing business with you again. It will drive away existing customers and ensure you lose future customers. It’s incredibly bad publicity for your business.
Securing your website also protects your physical equipment. You may think web hackers only seek out data and personal information, but they can also wreak havoc by installing viruses on your website that can infect your machines.
It’s incredibly costly to hire someone to repair the damage to your computers or worse, if you have to replace them altogether, on top of repairing your damaged website.
Recovering from a hacked website is possible but can be costly.
It’s important that the malware is removed from the website and that the whole website is tested to ensure the code and files are clean and safe to use again. This is a task for a professional who understands what to look for and how to remove the malware. This can be awfully expensive, on top of the lost revenue from website downtime and a potentially damaged reputation.
It’s far more cost-efficient to be proactive and ensure your web security is maintained, to prevent the breach from happening in the first place.
Cyber security should be a priority for your business. It’s essential to ensure you and your customers are safe, but it can be a lot of technical work to upkeep yourself whilst running a business.
To ensure peace of mind, make sure that your website is hosted with a provider who provides continuous monitoring of your site to keep it safe and secure from potential breaches.
Here at H&H Reeds, we have a specialised security strategy for all our websites. Our VPC secure cloud hosting has additional security features which enable us to protect our sites from countless threats.
Our security team are always on hand to help with any threats our server may be exposed to. Any known threats are automatically blocked, and we are immediately alerted to any significant threats on the server, so they pose no risk to our websites.
We use the best technology to ensure our websites stay online and are kept secure, so our customers have one less thing to worry about.
- Judith Sutherland, Head of Web Development
Find out more about our support and hosting services Website Hosting Support, or contact us today to find out more about how we can help maintain your web security.
