If someone were to give you money to put towards one aspect of your small business, which would you choose? Would you hire more staff? Would you modernize your office or improve inventory? What about marketing? You could surely use more promotion to get your business’s message out there. However, none of these matter if you don’t have up-to-date antivirus protection or a strong small business firewall. Here’s why.

More and more hackers are going after small businesses to get valuable information. These hackers are going after small businesses because they don’t have the security measures in place that larger companies have, and it can prove to be very costly. By hacking into computerized cash registers from another part of the world, hackers can walk away with credit card numbers, names, addresses and more. This information could be used to make fraudulent charges in the thousands of dollars.

In this story described here, one small business owner out of Chicago had his cash registers hacked, and credit card numbers were sent to Russia where they could be used to make fraudulent charges. MasterCard did not take too kindly to this and made the owner pay for the $22,000 investigation.

The owner was lucky that this didn't put him under. Some never come back after a hacking, and it’s not really their fault. Many small businesses do not have the money or resources to combat hackers. In 2010, 63 percent of all cybercrimes were done to businesses with employees of 100 or less. These are businesses that can’t afford the start-up fees of a network upgrade or ongoing upkeep costs. So what should small businesses do to protect their businesses without spending a small fortune in hardware and software upgrades?

An easy way for a business to protect itself is by looking into a hybrid cloud introduction model such as FLEXcloud among others. With a hybrid cloud, you get all of the benefits of cloud computing – including up-to-date antivirus software, state of the art firewall defenses, 100% up-time  and network reliability – without the costs of starting your own. Your network hardware will be connected to the cloud, and all you’ll spend is a small fee each month, depending on the number of users. Models like FLEXcloud allow you to stay one step ahead of the game against those trying to ruin your way of life.