In 2016, the Ponemon Institute completed a study on the “State of Cybersecurity in Small & Medium-Sized Businesses (SMB).” The study had many interesting findings, with highlights including:

• 55% of small & medium business suffered a cyber-attack in the past 12 months
• 50 % reported data breaches involving customer & employee information in the last 12 months
• 3 out of 4 reported that exploits have evaded their anti-virus solutions

The results align with what we see every day with clients that call us for incident response and recovery services:

Shopping for a laptop can be overwhelming. There are Chromebooks, Ultrabooks, 2 in 1s, tablets that act like laptops, laptops that act like tablets, and more! There are 5+ generations of processors made by multiple companies with different variations, sub variations and graphics cards. You must choose from a HDD, SSD or SSHD hybrid, decide how much RAM and of what type, and pick from a selection of wireless LAN cards that might as well be written in Latin. All together, we calculated an average of 23 separate decisions required when purchasing a laptop.

While the 23 decision points are important to the sophisticated technical decision maker, they can be debilitating to a small business owner that doesn’t know computers. That’s where we come in. We have simplified the process by reviewing and recommending one, and only one, laptop for the small business professional.

There simply isn't enough time in a day for most small businesses to run their core business, let alone protect themselves from hackers. For that reason, we put together this list of 8 simple tips, that aren't overly time consuming to implement and give small business owners the return on their time from a security standpoint.