{"id":17557,"date":"2016-08-25T15:00:07","date_gmt":"2016-08-25T22:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.paloaltonetworks.com\/blog\/?p=17557"},"modified":"2016-08-31T08:51:09","modified_gmt":"2016-08-31T15:51:09","slug":"cso-big-news-for-small-businesses-in-japan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/origin-researchcenter.paloaltonetworks.com\/blog\/2016\/08\/cso-big-news-for-small-businesses-in-japan\/","title":{"rendered":"Big News for Small Businesses in Japan"},"content":{"rendered":"

(This blog post is also available in Japanese<\/a>.)<\/em><\/p>\n

In August 2016, the Japanese National Center of Incident Readiness and Strategy for Cybersecurity (NISC) published a new document, Cybersecurity Approach for Business Management<\/em><\/a> (this is a Japanese link), targeted at major companies as well as small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). The NISC document follows up on Japan\u2019s September 2015 Cybersecurity Strategy<\/a>, which encourages business management to be cybersecurity-minded and invest in the same, and also the Cybersecurity Guidelines for Business Leadership Version 1.0<\/em> issued by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) and the Information-Technology Promotion Agency (IPA), which we profiled in our May 2016\u00a0blog post<\/a>.<\/p>\n

While the METI\/IPA guidelines are aimed squarely at business executives of major and medium-sized companies, the new NISC document fills an important need by targeting small businesses. In Japan, 99.7 percent<\/a> of companies are small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), employing 69.7 percent<\/a> of Japanese workers (Japan generally defines<\/a> SMBs as businesses with fewer than 300 employees). In Japan, like elsewhere, more and more SMBs are reliant on information technology (IT). According to the METI White Paper on SMBs in 2013<\/a>, 73 percent of medium-sized and 40 percent of small companies had their own website in 2007, rising to 80 percent and 46 percent in 2012, respectively. Although Japanese SMBs are aware that IT utilization can help them streamline their business operations, cut costs, and increase sales, they lack IT manpower, let alone cybersecurity specialists. Usually, the head of the company or family members take care of IT needs, due to limited resources.<\/p>\n

But SMBs are becoming more vulnerable. As major companies have enhanced their security, attackers have ramped up targeting of SMBs<\/a>, who often are short of resources even to detect breaches. A March 2016 IPA report<\/a> on SMB information security analyzed responses from nearly 4,000 SMB representatives in November 2015. According to the IPA survey:<\/p>\n