Look at the following statistics on insider threats. There are over 2,500 internal security breaches in the US every single day. The impact of insider threats affects more than 34% of businesses globally. Within the last 2 years, the increase in such incidents has gone up by 47%. The cost to businesses surpassed $2.7 million in 2020. Yet, employees are not the only threat when it comes to cybersecurity. Lax systems within the organization have a big role to play.

Last year’s rapid and sometimes erratic transition to remote work left many businesses looking for new ways to understand employee behavior when working from home. According to a survey of 2,000 employers offering remote or hybrid work, 78 percent deployed employee monitoring software to track worker behavior in the past six months. As businesses emerge from the recent pandemic, it’s clear that some things will not return to business as usual.

As businesses emerge from a pandemic year, cybersecurity concerns are necessarily top of mind . Companies face expansive cybersecurity threats on many fronts, prompting 75 percent of business leaders to view cybersecurity as integral to their organization’s COVID-19 recovery. They undoubtedly face an uphill battle. Surging ransomware attacks and increasingly deceptive phishing scams are attracting national attention, while more than 500,000 cybersecurity jobs remain unfilled in the US alone.

The costs and consequences of a data breach or cybersecurity incident have never been more severe. According to the FBI’s recently released Internet Crime Report 2020, cybercrime resulted in $4 billion in losses last year, a low estimate that still encapsulates the incredible value lost to threats actors. For small businesses, the costs can be catastrophic. As Vox reports, 60% of small businesses will close after a data breach, underscoring the high-stakes bottom-line nature of cybersecurity.

When you think of employee monitoring, your brain may initially jump to large, controlling corporations patrolling their thousands of workers. In reality, this idea is simply a myth, as small businesses can use employee monitoring to build trust amongst their remote teams, boost productivity, increase operational efficiency and benefit employees in multiple ways.

In February 2020, a Time Magazine headline declared, “The Coronavirus outbreak has become the world’s largest work-from-home experiment.” Over a year later, that experiment has been a resounding success for companies and employees who found abundant upsides to less rigid workplace expectations.

Businesses need to act now to survey their supply chain, developing the capacity to anticipate and respond to supply chain risks, minimizing the impact and optimizing opportunity. In March, the world witnessed a curious scene. A container ship longer than the Empire State Building became lodged in Egypt’s Suez Canal, creating an incredible spectacle as heavy construction equipment and a fleet of tug boats tried to dislodge the vessel from the canal walls.

Here’s how small business leaders can position their employees to thrive in a post-pandemic operational reality. The recent pandemic and associated economic fallout were especially challenging for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). The Washington Post estimates that more than 100,000 small businesses have permanently closed, and overall revenue plummeted by as much as 52 percent.