Starting out way back in about 2018 as techdebunked.com as a general hints & tips site for those curious about their – and their family’s – online safety, we decided we needed to do more than be just a passive resource for sensible online help and advice.
So, in 2019, we started researching what family and small business users of the internet, and of the devices connected to it, were genuinely worried about, or would like help with resolving.
In 2020, the online world changed completely.
Over the course of 3-4 months, from the Spring to the Summer of that year, COVID-19 forced millions of businesses of all sizes around the world to do things – the most basic things – online that they had never done before. Diverting customer phone lines to be answered remotely, relocating hardware to where it could be used, enabling staff to keep serving clients and customers either by working at a greater separation than before, or completely from home.
In the sudden and unexpected move online, needless to say the criminals were there, ready and waiting. In the UK alone, cybercrime spiked by over 26% in just one year with so many people unaccustomed to doing so much online being forced to do so for the first time.
We spent our time looking at the data and trends, still trying to work out what businesses needed from a cybersecurity services perspective.
We found that just 5% of micro-SMEs in the UK have any kind of commercial cyber insurance protection – and yet almost 50% of those same business have experienced some kind of cyber incident or attack in the last 12 months.
So we knew we had to do something … something to bridge the gap between no cyber resilience at all and the often extortionate cost of either getting someone in-house to look after data and cybersecurity or, at the very least, buying commercial cyber insurance in the event that the worst-case should happen.
So we designed the UK’s first cyber emergency helpline service dedicated to micro-SMEs, available 24/7 and staffed by ISO-certified and National Cyber Security Centre accredited staff – all based in the UK.
But we also knew that wasn’t enough – reacting after the event would be too late to help many small businesses who would be losing their livelihood on a daily basis.
Alongside our 24/7 emergency service, we also introduced expert, up-front cyber resilience consultancy specifically for micro-SMEs – which is included in our activid:ASSIST product.
Hand-in-hand with our online cyber risk self-assessment tools and scorecards, our consultants can help micro-SMEs up and down the country take those next steps to making their businesses that much more resilient to cyber attacks.
There’s plenty else that our activid service offers so please take a look and let us serve your business to help you stay trading despite the continuing increase in cyber attacks against even the smallest of business.
Welcome to our home, and I sincerely hope that we can be just a tiny part of your business success story.
Neil
activid Founder
