Dealing with difficult clients or suppliers and technology problems are the most common worry for many small business owners, according to a survey by YouGov.
The research found that 42% of respondents listed difficult clients or suppliers in their list of top three concerns, with the same amount pointing to technology not working properly.
Heavy workloads (30%), tight deadlines (26%) and long hours (19%) were the next biggest issues for small business owners.
But business crime does not seem to be a huge concern for most small business owners, the survey found, with just 9% rating it in their top three. There were, however, regional variations here with 13% of companies based in London listing it in their top three worries compared to just 3% in Scotland.
Loss of business data was a more general concern, with 10% of business owners concerned by this prospect.
There was a similar lack of concern over electronic crime, with 83% of respondents saying they had not been a victim in the last 12 months.
But according to internet content security provider Trend Micro, which commissioned the research, many small businesses may not even know when they have been attacked, with over half a million websites infected with malicious code in May alone.
"This suggests that we need to do much more to better inform and help the small business community about the new generation of security threats that are attacking their IT infrastructure silently," said Paul Burke, SMB product marketing manager at Trend Micro.
Trend Micro suggests the following tips on how small businesses can protect themselves from attack:
- Ensure that all employees use effective passwords and, when possible, stronger authentication technology. Encourage passwords that are comprised of different upper and lower case letter characters and change them frequently
- Discourage employee downloads from non-trusted sources such as peer-to-peer and video
- Protect your network; by ensuring that PCs and laptops are protected by firewalls, anti-virus software and web threat protection both within the office network as well as when mobile working
- Keep all operating systems and software up-to-date as without updates your systems will not be well protected against new cyber threats
- Create and manage back-ups. It is best to store secured copies and use encryption to protect sensitive records about employees, suppliers and customers
- Maximise encryption. You should protect customer data by encrypting it with passwords or encryption keys
- Don't leave sensitive data saved on a handheld or mobile device, in case it is stolen or lost
- Keep in mind that your company will grow and shop for security solutions that will grow with your business's pace