External attacks dominate headlines, but for SMBs, data-related risks often come from within. Whether through inadvertent errors or malicious activity, insider threats can compromise sensitive information, disrupt operations, and create compliance exposure.
Unlike external attacks, these risks are subtle and continuous, making them both difficult to detect and critical to manage.
Our recent study into SMB operations across the region – conducted by Forrester Consulting – indicates a growing awareness of insider risk, with 40% of SMBs intending to adopt Human Risk Management solutions and initiating cybersecurity awareness training programs for staff.
This tracks with the 63% of SMBs ranking the reduction of enterprise and IT risk exposure as a high-to-critical business objective.
While the study does not explicitly quantify how much of that risk comes from internal activity, it is reasonable to correlate a focus on enterprise and IT risk reduction with concern about both external and internal threats.
Taken together, these insights suggest increased awareness amongst SMBs that internal missteps, uncontrolled access, and user behaviour all contribute to operational risk.
This represents an increased need for proactive insider risk solutions and services that can integrate monitoring, governance and security controls to reduce exposure and enhance operational data resilience.
Insider risk encompasses both malicious activity and accidental mistakes, and in either case it often stems from gaps in how data is monitored, organised, and made recoverable. Routine errors, misconfigurations, or improper access can lead to real operational and regulatory risk.
Managing this risk effectively requires more than reactive monitoring; it needs businesses to have structured governance, to classify their data according to sensitivity and criticality, and to maintain secure, verified backups.
The three foundations of Data Protection are:
Without clearly defined ownership, access policies, and control frameworks, SMBs cannot reliably determine who should have access to which data, nor can they enforce consistent security policies.
Governance provides the rules of the road, ensuring that sensitive information is only accessible to authorised users and that deviations are logged and addressed.
Simply knowing that data exists is not enough. SMBs must understand the sensitivity and criticality of each data asset to apply appropriate safeguards. Classifying data allows organisations to prioritise monitoring, apply targeted controls, and enforce protection measures where they matter most. Without classification, insider incidents—whether accidental or intentional—can lead to the exposure or loss of highly critical data, while less sensitive data consumes unnecessary security resources.
Even with governance and classification in place, mistakes or malicious actions can result in data being corrupted, deleted, or otherwise rendered inaccessible. Backups provide a reliable safety net, allowing organisations to restore critical information quickly and minimise operational disruption. Verified, immutable backups ensure that the data is not only available but trustworthy, even if an insider incident compromises primary systems.
By connecting governance, classification, and secure backup practices with monitoring and response capabilities, partners create a cohesive service line that delivers both security and business value.
These foundational requirements need to be mapped to practical solutions that SMBs can adopt, either directly or as part of a partner-managed service.
This ensures that insider risk is addressed in a proactive, measurable, and recoverable way, rather than relying solely on reactive detection.
Solutions that address these areas include:
Provides data classification, sensitivity labelling, and automated Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies, helping SMBs enforce controls on sensitive assets and establish clear, auditable rules around data access and handling.
Automates retention policies, compliance monitoring, and reporting across SharePoint, Teams, and OneDrive, creating structured governance workflows that reduce exposure and simplify oversight.
Enable verified, immutable backups to ensure that critical data can be recovered quickly in the event of accidental deletion or malicious activity, supporting both IT and enterprise risk reduction objectives.
By integrating these solutions into a partner-led service, SMBs benefit from continuous monitoring, automated policy enforcement, and reliable recovery, transforming insider risk from a silent threat into a manageable and quantifiable aspect of their data protection strategy.
For MSPs and CSPs, insider risk represents a clear value-creation opportunity:
Deploy uSecure and Netwrix to track user behaviour and system changes in real time.
Configure Purview and AvePoint to classify data, apply retention and access controls, and enforce DLP policies.
Ensure Veeam, Acronis, and Wasabi solutions are integrated to provide verified, immutable backups for quick recovery from insider incidents.
Generate automated audit reports to satisfy regulatory requirements and demonstrate reduced IT risk exposure.
Deliver targeted cybersecurity training through uSecure to reinforce safe data-handling practices and reduce accidental risk events.
By advancing beyond reactive controls to holistic insider risk management, partners can help SMBs protect critical data, maintain compliance, and reduce operational risk, whilst creating a differentiated, revenue-generating service line that builds trust and long-term engagement.
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