Just look at business continuity and disaster recovery. A study conducted after Hurricane Katrina by Harris International (now known as Harris Interactive) for MasterCard found that only one-third of small businesses surveyed said they were prepared for a natural disaster in the next 12 months. Considering that disaster preparedness was on everyone’s mind at the time, many industry experts believe companies were at the peak of readiness then. In other words, there are many small businesses today that are not even protected.

IBM White Paper Sample

Security is also an issue. Hackers today are after confidential information about businesses and their clients to commit fraud and identity theft. They employ increasingly sophisticated blended attacks that may use socially engineered phishing e-mail messages. These spam messages are designed to fool even savvy computer users into thinking they are from legitimate sources. An unsuspecting user might click on a malicious executable file or URL link to a poisoned Web site set to automatically download spyware.

Most businesses expect their business partner to deal with this problem. In particular, they want their business partner to protect them from spam messages and have safeguards in place to detect and remove accidentally downloaded malicious software.