Sponsor: Symantec Corporation

Your website is your shop front, your brand on display and an essential sales and marketing tool. You spent a lot of money building it and attracting visitors. It is business critical: it would be a disaster if that shop front were smashed, your reputation was tarnished and visitors stopped coming. This is why website security is so important.

This white paper explores six threats to your website and what you can do to prevent them - website malware, malvertising, search engine blacklisting, security warning and expired certificates, brand impersonisation (phishing) and customer security concerns.

Small and midsized businesses have a particularly challenging time protecting company data. They have many of the same security and backup challenges as large enterprises, but fewer resources in terms of funding, time and specialized expertise.

The stakes are high: Symantec's State of Information Survey 2012 gathered information from more than 2,000 IT managers at companies with between five and 250 employees. Asked about the consequences of losing business data, the managers cited loss of customers (49%), brand damage (43%), increased expenses (41%) and decreased revenues (37%).The amount of data that businesses need to protect is also increasing rapidly. In the same survey, IT managers projected data stores at small and midsized businesses will grow 178% during the next year.

Why are security and the Cloud a perfectly matched pair for your business? Independently, they have lots of benefits. Security protects your key devices, like PCs, and mobile devices, from cyber-thieves' malware, viruses and other nasty threats that can compromise, or even destroy, your business' critical information. Cloud technology, on the other hand, might seem complicated but it's really a simple way to use sophisticated software, like security technology, without the day-to-day hassles of software updates, hardware maintenance, and other expensive and time-consuming tasks.

But both are better together - especially for small and medium businesses who want to protect their key information, but don't have a full-time IT shop to support the infrastructure.