25 May Cybersecurity can impact your SMB’s credit and trustworthiness

The long-term impacts of cohesive cybersecurity go beyond a safe and secure IT infrastructure. A safe environment improves credibility and strengthens brand identity. But did you know cybersecurity plays a role in company credit ratings too?

For loans, investments, and third-party clients, company credit gauges a variety of characteristics of an SMB. Safety is one of them. If a company has a poor rating, they’re less likely to see investments or receive loans. Furthermore, it could delay their ability to receive assistance or even achieve partnerships with new clients. Thus, credit assessments now include cybersecurity risk. If you want to maintain a healthy credit score, the question of cybersecurity is one you want an answer for – today.

What impacts SMB creditworthiness?

A business has a lot of factors to juggle regarding its credit. Cybersecurity is one of those extra factors to manage, affected by different external circumstances and occurrences. For IT, it’s important to remain mindful of factors harming your company’s creditworthiness.

Outages, downtime, and data loss are just a few dangers that land your business a negative ping as a result of a cybersecurity breach. SolarWinds, for example, suffered a downgrade to its overall rating following the breach event in 2020. Despite SolarWinds maintaining an efficient and proactive response as a result of the attack, their credit was still affected.

A cyber breach causes negative impacts on credit scores as it demonstrates a weak security foundation. Depending on how the breach occurred, it can reveal a variety of holes in an enterprise’s process. How long did recovery take? What is the true extent of the financial damage (some attacks, like ransomware, require weeks to months to fully recover financially)? What services were impacted?

The importance of good cybersecurity

Enterprise leaders and business owners need to reconsider their stance on cybersecurity if not already. It’s evolved well beyond the point of protecting digital assets from damage, theft, and downtime. Not only is a strong cybersecurity posture critical for maintaining regulatory compliance but maintaining brand strength too. A weak posture loses out on clients, ventures, investors, and customers as not only a result of bad security but worsening creditworthiness. Just as a consumer needs to mind their credit score, organizations must do the same.

You must also consider the changing landscape of creditworthiness, how credit is reported, and how lenders will respond as new technologies and datasets enter the market. In other words, how you best protect your data and the types of cybersecurity investments you make will have meaningful, long-term consequences – good or bad.

What should I do to protect my business?

Cybersecurity is no longer a question left to the experts. It’s a serious reality needing consideration at all levels of business operations. Therefore, management and executive leads need to look at their current architecture and make decisions based on strengthening cybersecurity posture.

Investing in resources, personnel, and defense resolutions is a top priority. It’s recommended to focus on key aspects of your enterprise too to achieve maximum efficiency. Some of those areas include:

• Introducing an identity access management (IAM) policy
• Cloud-based networking and virtualized resources to scale infrastructure
• Expanding education and awareness for best cybersecurity practices
• Compliance checks for cybersecurity regulations and standards

While investing in new architecture and resources takes time, the long-term results are worth it. Your organization’s response to modern threats and technology shifts improves. Furthermore, you secure a healthy creditworthiness score, ensuring safe investments, loans, and promoting brand integrity.

If you’re still struggling, however, it may be time to seek out third-party assistance. Bytagig is a practiced MSP drawing from years of experience and offering versatile remote IT and cybersecurity support.

For more information, you can contact us today.