By Adrian Hia Running a small business today means operating with very little room for slack. Owners are not just managing growth but making constant trade-offs, between hiring and automation, expansion and cost control and what feels urgent versus what is simply important. Staying lean is not a strategy – it’s just reality. Expenses are stretched and every investment is expected to deliver returns quickly. What keeps the business moving takes priority; what feels less immediate is pushed down the list – not ignored, just not today’s problem. Some risks naturally fall into that category. They sit at the back of the mind – part of the conversation, but not always part of the decision. Not because business owners underestimate the risks, but the impact is not always visible. At least, not until it is. Growth through going digital As businesses juggle these decisions being made, the environment around them has shifted too. Going digital is no longer just about efficiency, but access – to customers, to markets and to new ways of working. From digital payments and e-commerce platforms to cloud-based accounting and hybrid operations, much of running a business now sits online. For many SMEs, this shift was not gradual. It happened quickly, driven by the need to stay competitive, meet customer expectations, or comply with evolving requirements such as e-invoicing. As adoption accelerates, complexity follows. More devices, more systems, more touchpoints and more data moving across them. While businesses have adapted to this growing digital environment, the way risks are understood and managed has not always kept pace. This gap creates room for things to go wrong, often unnoticed and only surfacing when something stops working. As risk moves into daily operations According to the latest Kaspersky Security Network (KSN) data, over 3.3 million web attacks targeting