Home topics news News News EOFY a good reminder to protect digital assets Craig Scroggie July 11, 2011 While the financial year ends after June 30, for many businesses it’s the beginning of weeks of reconciling numbers and wrapping-up the financial year that was. Most business owners and their accountants don’t get to breathe that end of year sigh of relief until well into July or August and for some even longer. Many people don’t like doing their taxes – but thankfully for the SMB at least, things are getting a little easier with the help of online tools that manage tax returns and book-keeping tasks. Technology is now at the stage where, if SMBs really wanted, they can selectively source their book-keeping process using communities like Freelancer.com. Although, admittedly, it would take a brave SMB owner to do so! Technology continues to make life more convenient and cost effective for the small business owner. Recently this has been through areas such as cloud business applications, advances in mobile banking, and stakeholder and customer relationship management (CRM) tools available at the click of a mouse. However along with the added convenience of these online applications come new threats to information loss that the SMB owner needs to be aware of. A recent report by Symantec showed that cyber criminals are increasingly focused on targeted attacks aimed at stealing financial and personal information and the number of threats continues to grow. Globally in 2010, for example, data breaches caused by hacking