We are very fortunate to live in a time and place where business can be conducted quickly and conveniently through phones, laptops, and computers. More and more people are conducting transactions on the internet everyday, so much so that in 2019 there was an estimated one million dollars spent every sixty seconds on the internet (Next Gen Personal Finance). Each of these exchanges is generally a consumer offering money and their personal information in exchange for a product. But this convenience comes with a price that may not be apparent. By choosing to share our personal information such as email and credit card numbers, we are making ourselves vulnerable to cybercrime.The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency determined that customers lost an average of $358 and twenty one hours of time each year dealing with online crime (cisa.gov). Small businesses are often the targets of these cyber attacks because attackers want access to places with lots of customer information. Stores using electronics even as simple as a credit card machine are eligible for these attacks, and the only defense is the store owner. To make matters worse, most people don’t understand computers that well. Not just anyone can keep the information of customers a secret. That’s where Chary(pronounced like the Cherry fruit) comes in. Chary is a service designed to teach business owners safe habits and practices in a digital marketplace. Our services include classes like our Introductory Seminar, and we also offer employee training videos with practice materials. Chary aims to help small businesses conduct businesses online without incurring the cost of hiring someone full time.
Hiring an Information Technology Professional is expensive. According to Zippia.com, the average Information Technology Professional in America earns $74,686 per year. The higher end of this spectrum is over $100,000 per year and the lower end of the spectrum is close to $50,000 per year (Zippia.com). Many businesses cannot afford these salaries and therefore result to handling their technology themselves. I have seen this firsthand in the instance of my friend Will. Will owns a small business in Virginia and he has told me he doesn’t have the money to pay people to operate websites or social media, and he certainly doesn’t have an extra $50,000 to pay an IT professional. Instead, he trusts a friend of the family to do that work for free. But businesses have needs and urgencies, and without a salary you can’t expect someone to be available when you need them. Billions of records have been stolen in the past decade. UpGuard.com lists some of the biggest data breaches of the decade such as the CAM4 data breach, the Yahoo! data breach, and the Aadhaar data breach. The CAM4 data breach of 2020 leaked a whopping 10 billion records, including things such as full names, sexual orientations, and IP addresses. Once the attackers gained this information, they attempted to use more targeted attacks in order to access any cloud-based accounts attached to the leaked information. While the CAM4 breach leaked 10 billion records, the Yahoo! Breach affected 3 billion accounts with an increased chance of identity theft. Thankfully much of the sensitive information in the Yahoo! breach remained safe, but it alerted more people to the reality and danger of cyber attacks. The goal of Chary is to help businesses learn to manage their own information technology and protect those businesses from cyberattacks.
Chary educates businesses in a multitude of ways. The Introductory Seminar is our primary service and it serves as the customer’s introduction to the Chary platform. This platform should include things such as employee training videos, practice materials, and of course the introductory seminar. The seminar should offer a few crucial things to the customer. First, it should identify the importance of cybersecurity. Second, it should introduce the type of technology necessary to conduct business on the internet. This equipment includes devices such as credit card readers, Point of Sales systems, computers, routers, and modems. The third crucial thing our platform offers is the training material. Our training material should include modules with up to date training on modern scams. The Federal Communications commission has laid out 10 Cybersecurity tips for small businesses and our goal at Chary is to help customers learn information such as this and apply it to their businesses.
There will be many barriers for Chary. According to Enterprise Engineering
Solutions, “businesses must comply with various laws on cybersecurity, such as the General Data Protection Regulation, the Health Insurance portability and Accountability Act and the California Consumer Privacy Act.” One of the first barriers for Chary will be keeping up with these regulations and also staying up to date on modern scams. Acquiring our first customers could be another barrier, but there is a large demand for Information Technology professionals and I believe Chary can be a successful alternative to hiring an IT professional. The biggest barrier may be the other companies that offer information technology support. Companies such as ESET ( Essential Security Against Evolving Threats), Norton, and McAfee all offer antivirus programs for business, but these are mostly subscription services focused on antiviruses.While antiviruses are certainly necessary, Chary also focuses in educating employees about cyberthreats because nearly 98% of all cyber attacks involve social engineering (eftsure.com)
In order to be successful, Chary needs to garner attention in multiple different places at once. If we focus on an online platform that does not rely on brick and mortar locations, I believe we can grow the company across the U.S. without ever leaving Virginia. This success will also depend on the feedback from our customers therefore our success can be measured in customer satisfaction. Contraversely, we will know we are unsuccessful if any cyber attack is successful against our customer and we will have to learn and adapt. Our success can also be measured in our revenue. Chary needs to be profitable in order to continue to operate. A gauge of success that I like to employ is accomplishing the same task with fewer people. If I am in charge of Chary personally, I would like to keep the team very small. I have been in laborious jobs for a decade now and I know from experience that a few good men can outwork a dozen casuals. I would like to minimize spending on labor as much as possible. I have never been in business before, but I took many classes in the business college here at Old Dominion and I learned human labor is an enormously expensive resource. If I could keep Chary profitable and well liked by customers while deploying a unique business approach that focuses on deleting labor through design and policy, I would consider it successful.
Sources
https://www.cisa.gov/be-cyber-smart/facts
https://www.upguard.com/blog/biggest-data-breaches
https://www.zippia.com/information-technology-professional-jobs/salary/