With more than 4 billion internet users currently worldwide, the internet is an incredible way for people to stream information and for businesses to make immense profits through online services and sales. It's also the leading cause of security breaches that put 61 percent of small businesses out of business within six months of a cyber attack.

Unless it’s your area of expertise, you probably lump everything that happens in your business on any tech device including computers, printers, phones, etc. into a single arena: IT. But that’s not entirely accurate. So what, exactly, is IT? What does it mean to outsource your IT support, and what services will the support company provide?

An IT support company can make sure that your platform is secure, remotely accessible, and efficient, remotely managing your IT infrastructure as well as your end-user systems, and some offer more services.

You already know that your business is always at risk of a data security breach, and you’ve taken all appropriate precautions. Your personal information is as vulnerable, if not more so. If either your business or your personal accounts are hacked, it can wreak havoc on your finances in both realms.

Your business has a lot of sensitive data about your operations, your partners, and your customers. You are likely (hopefully) doing everything you can to protect that information from hackers who want to steal it and make money off it. You’ve even hired an IT support company to make things more secure — unless your IT provider is inadvertently making you vulnerable to attack!

Many businesses, especially those too small to have an IT budget big enough for a robust internal defense team, turn to IT support companies to meet their IT needs.

Cybersecurity is a crucial investment for any business, one that can make a difference between being easy prey for hackers and staying safer for longer. However, high-profile data breaches at tech giants such as Facebook, Google, and Yahoo show that any company’s security can be compromised, no matter how much they invest in cyber protection.

This year, some of the most popular companies faced massive security breaches, affecting millions of users and exposing private and financial information. This data was either acquired for malicious use by the hacker themselves or sold off to the highest bidding cyber-criminal organizations.

Do you know exactly what your IT support will cost each month? Why not?

If your IT support company is like most, your bills can vary month to month, sometimes by thousands of dollars. This is because most IT support companies bill hourly for many of their services.

Information technology is a sophisticated, multifaceted tool that touches every aspect of your business and requires regular maintenance to keep operating at full capacity.

IT problems can be small inconveniences like a printing issue or a full-blown catastrophe like a companywide data breach that interrupts your entire functionality, including client services.

Hackers are experts at their craft and always on the lookout for innovative ways to breach a network and extract private information. They cleverly mimic the company's own sites, for instance when hackers built an exact copy of a large local hospital's website.

Facebook has been under fire for a while because of its handling of user data, and its recent security breach has only amplified public scrutiny. It’s the biggest in the company’s history, and has implications that reach far beyond the potential 90 million compromised accounts.