The Diverse Range of Businesses Using SecAlerts

When SecAlerts launched in 2019, we positioned ourselves mainly for the small and medium business (SMB) market. Rather than offer a suite of products for "mucho dinero", we concentrated on one crucial aspect of cybersecurity - vulnerability alerts - that goes a long way to preventing cyber attacks.

Small businesses top the list of 'most vulnerable to cyber attack', followed by the much bigger industries of healthcare, government, energy and higher education.

Small businesses find themselves in this position because, among other things, they often lack a cybersecurity strategy and / or cyber protection. They are usually too small to have a cybersecurity expert on the payroll, let alone an IT department, and those few that do use cybersecurity software often have quite basic versions that only cover things like virus or spam attacks.

But the times they are a changin' and I recently spoke with Blake Deakin of Cyber Insurance Australia, who noted that smaller businesses were becoming more 'cyber savvy'.

"Hackers have, in recent years, realised that bigger companies are getting harder to target because they have the resources to protect themselves," he told me. "They turned their attention to smaller businesses and, as a result, these SMBs have become more aware of their cyber security and are taking measures to protect themselves."

Even though our intended market was SMBs, once we launched we had no control over where SecAlerts travelled in the vastness of the internet and who used our service.

As it's turned out, not all our clients are SMBs and we have our fair share of 'biggies'. These include global brands like Deloitte, Adidas and Lonely Planet, as well as a flooring company with upwards of $10 billion in annual sales, private banks and government departments of numerous countries around the world.

However, at the other end of the scale are online clothing stores, furniture makers, auto dealerships, an online tutoring service, a chain of organic food stores and an employee-owned organic farm.

No matter the size, what's been heartening for us is the diverse range of businesses using SecAlerts. It shows that the message is spreading - it's hard to ignore the amount of cyber crime being reported daily - far and wide and businesses are aware of the importance of cybersecurity and willing to bolster their defences with a vulnerability alert service.

SecAlerts isn't far into its cybersecurity journey and, like life, it's taking many interesting and varied paths we could never have imagined on 'day one'. However, each new user points to the fact our service is being embraced. In this world of ever-increasing cyber attacks, that can only be a good thing.