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Cyber Security Fundamentals for Growing Businesses (Beyond Antivirus)

Antivirus is table stakes. The real question is what you do above it. Here is the baseline every business of 20–200 employees should have.

Cyber security for businesses in the 20–200 employee range is in a strange middle zone — too big for consumer-grade tools, too small to justify a full security team. Most attacks succeed because of basic missing controls, not because of sophisticated adversaries.

The baseline that catches 80% of incidents

Multi-factor authentication on every account that supports it.
Conditional access policies on email and cloud apps.
Endpoint detection and response (EDR), not just signature-based antivirus.
Patched operating systems and browsers via centralized management.
Email security with phishing simulation and link rewriting.
Backup and tested disaster recovery (test, not just configure).

Where most businesses miss

The single biggest gap is not technology — it is response. When a phishing alert fires, who looks at it? When a backup fails, who notices? Without monitoring and response, every other control becomes evidence that you should have caught the incident sooner.

The cost of an incident

Ransomware recovery on a 50-employee business runs $80K–$300K when you factor in downtime, legal, and remediation. Cyber insurance helps but is increasingly conditional on having the baseline controls above already in place.

BUILDLAB Managed IT bakes the baseline into every subscription tier — MFA, EDR, monitoring, patching, and tested backups — so the controls exist before they are needed.

Tags:cyber-security smb monitoring governance mfa