5 Serious Challenges for SMEs in 2020

Amidst civil unrest at home, use of students to aim political goals, and US v/s Iran possibilities, we sneaked through 2020. This has effectively set aside more important issues of the economy slow down, unemployment, and fiscal deficit.

India is like this only, action around us makes us ignore our own pains.

For my reader’s information, I am compiling 5 points which will change the way you operate you enterprise, in year 2020.

Privacy, Privacy, and Privacy

We, Indians, are very social people. Even if we mind it, we receive calls and messages for credit cards, personal loan, life insurance, share trading accounts, dating network, shabby SPAs and what not. Our contact details are taken as public property and you witness mockery of DND directory. This is going to drastically change in 2020 just like EU and Western World post GDPR. With Data Privacy Law to be proposed in this year, DND will have all the teeth and claws. Enterprises in the business of Automobile Dealership, Insurance Companies, Banks, Hospitals, Pathology Laboratories, Share Brokers, Dmat Participants, Charter Accountant Firms, Airlines, Hotels, Schools, Colleges, and many such will be subject to investing in the systems and practices to protect their consumer / customer / client’s data they are handling for rendering their services. There will be stringent provisions to penalize any leakage of the data entrusted to these enterprises leading to privacy breach.

Ransomware

This is going to be synonymous to digital terrorism. We have just seen the trailers in last 3 years. With increased use of mobiles, laptops which are mostly out of your Firewall purview, this is going to be prevalent beyond imagination. Enterprises will be caught sleeping, if they think that they have Firewall / Antivirus to prevent Ransomware. They will be at irreversible losses if they have not provided for the rebound strategies if they are affected by Ransomware. Firewall and Antivirus will not be enough. They will be ducked frequently by new generation Ransomware. Enterprises will have to work on Rebound Strategies to get them going in minimal time after being affected by Ransomware.

Liabilities arising from Acts of Employees of the Company

Data will be the new crude. It will have tremendous competitive value and necessarily accessible at the finger tips of employees’ laptops, mobiles and desktops. Its already started with Tesla, Amazon, Google, Uber who have fired many employees for conspiring Data Leakage and Theft. We, the SMEs are not so resourceful as these giants are. Our data in the form of Designs, Drawings, Documents, Cost Sheets, ERP Data, Tenders, Customer Data, NDA bound Information and whatever you can think of. You cannot naturally and practically monitor every act of data ex-filtration. In my opinion, to deal with such serious matter, SMEs will have to focus on control rather than monitoring. SMEs will have to invest in systems which can devise controls on majority of employees and can monitor minority of employees who cannot be subjected to controls due to their position, work requirements and seniority. Maximum Controls and Minimum Monitoring will be the new mantra to prevent data theft and leakage. It will protect enterprise from competitive exploitation (due to data leakage to competitors), minimize liabilities (due to NDA breach or privacy breach) and transfer liabilities on the doer by strong evidence creation capabilities.

Provisions of Disaster Response

Most SMEs are happy having 2 hard disks inside the server, one for use and one for backup. This will have to change. Ransomware / Calamities / Disaster / Hardware Failure are the situation which can lead to irrecoverable loss of data. We will have to go level next by compressing, encrypting and transferring our data out of premise daily. The same holds true for Laptops which carries invaluable digital assets of the company.

Licensing Compliance

Indian legal system has started recognizing CopyRight violation as a very serious crime and demonstrated zero tolerance off late recently. Piracy of software which was so easy in India, is not extremely difficult and punitive measures are good enough to stop the business in no time. SMEs will have to avoid using pirated software. Many a times SMEs use pirated software even if they don’t need them, just because they are cheap. There will be all new world of alternative systems  to be adopted to run your business instead of using pirated software.

We at Synersoft, run Knowledge Center named after our path breaking product BLACKbox loved by thousands of SMEs.

Best Regards,

Vishal Shah
Founder and CEO,
Synersoft Technologies Pvt Ltd