Risks Archives - BOLLYWOOD SURKHIYAN

Introduction

Your own business – an expensive German car or even a red Italian one, holidays in the Swiss Alps, your own condo on a remote island – all potential benefits of having your own business. On the other hand you have the prophets of doom that highlights the long hours, difficult employees, economic recessions, stress and high rates of bankruptcies in business. What is the reality?

In actual fact most new entrepreneurial ventures fail within the first few years. Only a small percentage really makes good money. There are various risks in starting your own business that cannot be ignored. These risks can, however, be drastically reduced with detailed market research, proper business planning and effective management. The potential rewards, for the successful entrepreneur, make the effort more than worthwhile.

Some of the more important risks are:

Financial Risk

The personal financial investment of having your own business is generally quite high. Business failure can mean a substantial financial loss for the entrepreneur (and for other stakeholders) and it can even cause bankruptcy.

Social Risk

A business requires much input from the entrepreneur. This implies less time for family life, friendship, sport, entertainment and holidays. The potential of losing a friend and even a marriage partner is very real.

Career Risk

When an entrepreneur starts his or her own business they normally resign from their present job. If things go wrong it can be difficult or even impossible to resume a career.

Psychological Risk

People handle stress different. Good stress, called eustress, gives a person enough adrenaline to handle difficult situations in a positive way. Distress, on the other hand, can be destructive to the entrepreneur and the business. It can leads to serious burnout and depression. Distress can be caused by working too hard over extended times, too much worries about the various aspects of the business (especially if everything is not going to plan), no proper support system (e.g. from a spouse) and even the feeling that the business was a mistake and that the entrepreneur is climbing the wrong ladder.

Fortunately substantial rewards await the successful entrepreneur, including some of the following:

Financial Rewards

A successful business has the potential to make good profits and provide substantial wealth for the entrepreneur. If this wealth is handled with care it can make a big difference in the financial well-being of an entrepreneur (and his or her spouse and descendants).

Social Rewards

There is seldom a higher reward than making a positive difference to another person’s life. Entrepreneurship is already creating most of the new jobs and wealth in the world. The successful business provides jobs, pride and financial security for its employees. Personal wealth can also be used to make a difference to a family member, a friend, the community or any worthwhile cause.

Independence Rewards

Your own business provides you with the privilege to work for yourself, at your own pace, without a boss and having a sense of freedom. Financial success increases the independence potential.Growth Rewards

The whole entrepreneurial process is a personal growth process and an entrepreneur learns about failure and success, difficult people and situations and especially about themselves. Knowledge about various disciplines will also be enhanced. Successful entrepreneurs generally experience a sense of self-actualisation.

Summary

Having your own business definitely carry substantial risks. If you, however, have the right personality profile, the necessary expertise, and the will to prepare diligently and work hard the chances of entrepreneurial success improve drastically. The potential rewards then outweigh the risks by far.

In the recent years, it has been observed that many businesses have been rapidly affected by various types of cyber attacks. Companies continue to be under great pressure and strive to keep their information safe and secure. Some of the common security risks businesses continue to face have been listed below:

1. Human factor and peoples’ reactive mindset: The employees working in the business could form the major base for cyber threats as they are more prone to open phishing emails or download links that could turn out to be malware. Moreover, the top level management or people at the C level will be less prone to become malicious insiders. Due to this a serious concern of privilege abuse by lower level employees is more common as they become malicious insiders and measures need to be taken to overcome this problem.

2. Password protection measures play vital role: Businesses should be extremely aware that they should maintain all important business accounts with a two factor password authentication such that it may not be easily hacked. This password needs to be changed and maintained effectively once in 30 or 45 days to keep it more safe and away from any security attacks.

3. Aging Infrastructure and drastic Patch Management necessary: In addition to the above security risks, hardware can also be a major issue as lifecycle of most of the devices is becoming increasingly shorter these days. Purchase only new hardware that can uphold updates such that aging factor can be taken care off. Recent attacks such as the WannaCry and Petya outbreaks have underlined the importance of regular software updates that needs to be taken up. Even for Eternal Blue, it allowed the malware to spread within corporate networks without any user interaction, making these outbreaks particularly virulent. The above incidents do show the importance of protecting vulnerable systems and patching is a key way to do it.

4. Difficulty with Data Integrations: It is interesting to note that the amount of data that flows through an organization could for reasons overwhelm anyone as it contains very critical information. This could be about employees, partners, stakeholders, service providers etc. But integrating various data sources is crucial to have a clear understanding of various risks involved within or outside the organization.

5. Lack of a Proper security recovery plan: Most businesses are still unaware of the impounding risks with cyber security and lack a proper plan to overcome such situations. They need to draft a plan that contains the actions that could be taken up when there is a cyber attack and thus can quickly and efficiently minimize the risk and save information or other economic losses.

How Can Businesses protect themselves?

Certain solutions like SecOps provide superior customer experience along with a robust cyber security. This security product has capabilities of secure operations while focusing on delivering a seamless customer experience. This specific Security and Experience go together approach finds the right balance between the ease of user experience and effectiveness of security protection. These solutions cover the entire software lifecycle, from secure design to security testing in development and QA, app self-protection and monitoring in product and patching. Security is an enabler of new business opportunities in addition to helping protect your company’s people, data, and systems. Cloud Security is achieved through following certain cloud adoption strategies with specific focus placed on security and privacy to improve all operations and make them secure.

Tag: Risks

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