James Holloway

Before You Buy a SIEM, Answer This Question Most small business owners who search for “best SIEM tools” are doing so because they heard the term from an IT consultant, read it in a cyber insurance questionnaire, or saw it on a compliance checklist. That’s a reasonable starting point. Here’s the question to answer before … Read more

The Idea Is Smart. Here’s Whether the Execution Delivers. Most small businesses are running at least two security-adjacent tools they bought separately: a backup solution and an antivirus or endpoint protection product. They have two agents installed on every device, two admin consoles to check, two renewal invoices to manage, and two vendors to call … Read more

The Rule That Overrides Everything Else Before we discuss a single product, one rule: the 3-2-1 backup strategy is not optional for any small business in 2026. 3 copies of your data. 2 on different types of media. 1 stored off-site (or in the cloud). In 2025, 66% of organisations reported a ransomware attack. The … Read more

Two Established Tools, Built for Different Buyers Proofpoint and Mimecast are both serious, well-established email security platforms. Both have been protecting business inboxes for over 20 years. Both integrate cleanly with Microsoft 365. Both catch phishing, block malware, and filter spam reliably. If you run either of them correctly, your email is meaningfully more secure … Read more

Your Inbox Is the Most Common Entry Point for Every Attack 94% of malware is delivered by email. Business Email Compromise (BEC) — where an attacker impersonates your CEO, a supplier, or a client to request a fraudulent payment — cost businesses $2.9 billion in 2025 according to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center. And … Read more

The Short Answer Yes. For most small businesses with a basic IT-aware person on staff, Bitdefender GravityZone is the best value endpoint security product in the market in 2026. The detection scores are among the highest of any vendor in independent testing. The agent is lightweight enough to run on older hardware. The management console … Read more

Antivirus Is Not Enough Anymore. Here’s What Is. In 2025, 82% of successful cyberattacks used no malware at all. They used legitimate tools already on your computer — PowerShell scripts, remote desktop connections, built-in Windows utilities — to move through your network invisibly. Traditional antivirus, which detects threats by matching files against a database of … Read more

Two Strong Tools, Two Different Priorities If you’ve narrowed your shortlist to 1Password and Dashlane, you’ve made a good decision: both are genuinely well-built business password managers, neither has suffered a major breach, and both will solve the credential chaos that makes small businesses vulnerable. The question isn’t whether either is good enough — it’s … Read more

The Weakest Link in Your Business Security Is Probably a Password Stolen credentials were the initial access vector in 22% of all confirmed breaches in the 2025 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report. That makes compromised passwords the single largest cause of breaches — ahead of phishing, ahead of unpatched software. And the reason it keeps … Read more

First, the Answer to the Question You’re Probably Already Asking If you’ve been searching for “Perimeter 81” and ended up here, there’s something you need to know before we go any further: Perimeter 81 no longer exists as an independent product. Since 2023, Perimeter 81 has been owned by Check Point Software Technologies and renamed … Read more