Today, I moderated a cybersecurity panel at The Business Show with Mark Johnson, Jean Pascal Deillon , and Angela Foglia at the Miami Beach Convention Center. The audience was mostly from SMBs, providing a very good opportunity to directly speak with small business owners and service providers.
Most of the time, my conversations are with executives and C-level individuals at larger organizations or AI builders. This was a new experience for me, as well as for my friends Mislav and Adnaan, who joined me on this journey. I shared my experience with a ransomware attack on our websites in 2016 when we had 20 million monthly visitors at PositiveMed.com and consequently a couple of weeks of stress. The panel revolved around four main topics:
1. How can businesses catch up with the ever-changing cybersecurity landscape, especially with AI?
2. What are the common cybersecurity mistakes businesses make?
3. How to maintain cybersecurity hygiene on a limited small business budget?
4. How to protect the privacy of your data on the cloud?
I attended the show with Mislav Malenica and Adnaan C and had the chance to explore the expo, observe, and analyze. The show was very diverse, with a WordPress agency next to a payment processing company, next to a branding studio, and next to a title-based targeting company.
I told Mislav that this feels like real America. The show was thriving. Unlike most who are concerned about the interest rates and a potential crash, you can see the economy is thriving, tech is thriving, and of course, there were a lot of AI companies popping up.
Mislav raised a good point about how straightforward the messaging of small businesses is, and how we, the techies, often talk about our technologies rather than the value it brings to our customers. We mostly talk nerdy about our tech and how the technology behind it is so impressive. We have to simplify our messaging to be so simple and to the point for those we pitch to.