Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are the cornerstone of economic growth. According to a 2010 research report, 91 percent of formal business entities in South Africa are SMEs contributing between 52 and 57 percent to the country's GDP, and about 61 percent to employment. They form the bread and butter of our country as job providers, poverty reducers, service delivery agents and economy boosters.

Despite this, SME's are often ignored by technology vendors who prefer to focus on their larger cousins, organisations of over 200 people, and have to make do with IT solutions that aren't tailored to their unique needs. This is particularly true of e-mail management and information compliance, where SMEs have to meet stringent regulations without the backing of vast IT departments and budgets.

Every profession has its own mandates, operating requirements, and best practices. While these assist companies within these professions to perform effectively within the criteria of their particular sector, they can often prove onerous for smaller businesses to maintain and manage.

This is particularly true in the case of the small legal firms that have a gamut of compliance directives to manage in order to conform to stringent operational guidelines. As Information Technology (IT) increasingly permeates every aspect of business, legal experts are finding themselves having to try and become IT experts to manage the systems their businesses run on.

Mitigating the risks caused by breaches to company information is not only based on compliance and the use of security technology and software programs; it's largely an issue of understanding your business and motivating staff buy-in. This is the opinion of J2 Software's managing director, John Mc Loughlin, who advises on prevention strategies, including embedding a culture dedicated to protecting the intellectual capital of organisations.

Despite news of hacking, industrial espionage, corporate data theft, data leaks and other breaches and assaults on enterprise information coming to the fore and grabbing headlines almost daily, a shocking amount of businesses – especially smaller ones – are still under the impression that they are immune to such cyber threats.

"There is still a wrongful belief among small to medium enterprises (SMEs) that hackers and other types of cyber criminals are only after big corporations," says John Mc Loughlin, Managing Director of J2 Software. "They mistakenly think that they are too insignificant to become targets and that it will, therefore, never happen to them."