It’s safe to say that to varying degrees, IT is used by most, if not all businesses and organisations in Wales and England. Unfortunately, it’s also safe to say that these same businesses and organisations are therefore at risk from the ever increasing threat posed by cyber criminals!

Terms such as ‘computer virus’ and ‘hacker’ are often banded about willy-nilly, but do you actually know what they mean, or how and why they pose a threat to your business? You may, like many others, consider your computers to be secure - you’ve installed antivirus software, therefore your protected right?! Wrong, although it is important to have updated antivirus software, simply installing and updating antivirus software does not protect you, your IT infrastructure, your business or most importantly your data from all the many and varied threats that are employed by the cyber criminals looking for their next ‘easy target’.

Cyber crime, hi-tech crime or e-crime as it is often called, is the illegal exploitation of computer technologies such as the Internet, to either attack the technology itself or to support so called ‘old’ crimes such as fraud, identity theft and embezzlement. The threat to your business cannot be understated, e-crimes can and do have a serious impact on businesses. It is therefore essential that businesses and organisations are fully aware of the threats posed to them and how they can protect themselves through taking the appropriate security measures.

The types of threats to be aware of include:

(For information on each type of threat, just do a quick Google search on the terms listed)

Well according to e-Crime Wales (e-Crime Wales is a partnership of Welsh Police Forces, specialist public sector organisations and expert commercial businesses) "any business using a computer is at risk!" "e-Crime is on the rise, with more and more sophisticated or creative ways of breaching IT security being unearthed every day". The problem is costly and based on figures from 2009 "e-Crime currently costs Welsh businesses around £373 million every year, through direct financial or intellectual property theft, disruption of communications or damage to business-critical data". (www.ecrimewales.com).

The information on your IT system is extremely valuable and not only do you need to consider the potential damage to your business if data is either destroyed or stolen, you also need to consider the knock-on effect to your reputation - how would your clients feel if their details were stolen from your systems? It is an absolute must that you take every possible precaution to protect your systems and your data!

In the world of cyber crime and IT security, it is far better to be proactive rather than reactive. Spending a little time, and if needed, money now, could save you lots of time, aggravation and indeed money in the future. Although the risk of e-crime is very real, there are a number of things that can be done to reduce the threat of your business being targeted. Some measures to put in place are simple and easy to implement, some however are more complicated and require expert knowledge to execute.

You’ll be pleased to know that BCC are experts at securing IT systems and offer a range of solutions specifically aimed at protecting a businesses’ IT systems from the types of threats mentioned above. For example, the installation of a hardware-based firewall can help to avert unauthorised entry into your system.

All our firewall solutions provide business-class protection and are available according to the size, feature level and demands of your organisation. BCC are pleased to provide a number of solutions from some of the world’s leading manufacturers, with CISCO and Fortinet prominent in our preference for unrivalled protection.

Firewalls can however be more than security devices and according to the particular product chosen, these multi functional devices can be used to incorporate a number of additional features like VPN Routing, Denial of Service (DoS) protection and Intrusion Detection using Stateful Packet Inspection (SPI), URL access and content filtering, as well as logging, reporting and real-time alerts.

Simply put, a hardware firewall or UTM device (Unified Threat Management) is an absolute MUST-HAVE piece of hardware for most, if not all businesses.