Latest news with #SMBs
Business Wire
12 hours ago
- Business
- Business Wire
New N-able Report Underscores Escalating Cyber Threats Facing SMBs
BURLINGTON, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- N‑able, Inc. (NYSE: NABL), a global software company delivering a unified cyber resiliency platform, today launched its first annual 2025 threat report, exploring the rise in cyberattacks on small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) ranging from 100-2,500 employees. The report uncovers a dramatic rise in detected threats across SMBs, from approximately 48,749 in June 2024 to over 13.3 million by June 2025, as they increasingly invest in the proper security tools to monitor their environments and mitigate risk. While many SMBs have long assumed they're too small to be targeted by cybercriminals, new data from N-able shows that perception is rapidly changing. Threat actors are increasingly favoring quicker, low-effort attacks on SMBs over complex enterprise breaches, exploiting limited defenses for faster payoffs. The N-able unified platform is designed to help SMBs level the playing field by delivering enterprise-grade visibility, protection, and response capabilities tailored to their unique needs. "Legacy security controls don't keep pace with the challenges faced by today's SMB,' said Kevin O'Connor, Director of Threat Research at N-able. 'Adversaries are constantly developing and deploying attacks that exploit common gaps in visibility and response. SMBs need solutions that deliver coverage across the threat lifecycle and fit within operational constrains – exactly what N-able provides.' Using data from the N-able ecosystem, the N-able threat research team revealed the following: Cybercriminals are targeting small and midsized businesses more than ever: Attackers are no longer skipping over smaller businesses — in fact, they're increasingly targeting them. AI is supercharging social engineering: Attackers are leveraging generative AI to create convincing phishing messages that resemble real people and writing styles. Certain messages are even able to fool the most tech-savvy of employees. Ransomware remains a significant threat: The pervasive impact of ransomware accounted for nearly 1.9 million detections in the first half of 2025 observed by the team. 'The findings align closely with what we're seeing, the pace of change in cybersecurity is relentless. It's easy to get caught up in the complexity of today's landscape: AI-driven threats, ransomware attacks, evolving regulations, and a flood of new tools and technologies. But real success comes from going back to the basics. Things like maintaining patches, ensuring reliable backups, continuous monitoring, endpoint protection, and having clear processes in place – businesses can't afford to operate in reactive mode,' said Vinod Paul, President at Align. 'When we stay grounded in the basics, we're in the best position to protect our clients and build lasting trust. We trust N-able as a partner that delivers on the promise of cybersecurity.' N-able will demonstrate its unified platform—purpose-built to address threats across every stage of the attack lifecycle at Black Hat 2025, taking place August 5–7 at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. The platform integrates cyber resilience across endpoint management, security operations and backup and data protection. Attendees can visit the N-able team at Booth #3064. To view the full report, please visit About N‑able At N‑able, our mission is to protect businesses against evolving cyberthreats with a unified cyber resiliency platform to manage, secure, and recover. Our scalable technology infrastructure includes AI-powered capabilities, market-leading third-party integrations, and the flexibility to employ technologies of choice—to transform workflows and deliver critical security outcomes. Our partner-first approach combines our products with experts, training, and peer-led events that empower our customers to be secure, resilient, and successful. © 2025 N‑able Solutions ULC and N‑able Technologies Ltd. All rights reserved. The N‑able trademarks, service marks, and logos are the exclusive property of N‑able Solutions ULC and N‑able Technologies Ltd. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Category: Company
Finextra
a day ago
- Business
- Finextra
Elavon and WooCommerce expand payments partnership to North America
Elavon, a global payments leader, and WooCommerce, the ecommerce platform powering more than four million online stores globally, are expanding their successful European payments partnership across the Atlantic to North America. 0 This content is provided by an external author without editing by Finextra. It expresses the views and opinions of the author. Installing the free-to-download Elavon extension from the WooCommerce Marketplace gives merchants instant access to Elavon's proven payment services, helping micro, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) rapidly grow into additional markets. With a loyal base of more than two million users and a 4.3 Trustpilot customer satisfaction rating in North America, Elavon makes it simple for merchants to scale online. It will directly manage all merchants using the extension, meaning it can offer SMBs in the United States and Canada more value-added services as their businesses grow. Elavon's focus on integrating payments into software brings together a full suite of services for ecommerce platforms and independent software vendors (ISVs) to offer their clients. Elavon Payment Gateway can quickly integrate ecommerce platforms and ISVs to bring secure, fast and compliant payments wherever they are needed. For the last 12 months, Elavon and Woo have delivered secure and speedy online payments for small and medium-sized businesses in Europe. The new deal means merchants in North America join millions of Woo sellers across Europe who are able to access Elavon's reliable, flexible payment solution. Eva Paredes, Head of SMB, UK and Ireland at Elavon remarked, "Having proven the effectiveness of our payment services with WooCommerce merchants across Europe, we're excited to expand our partnership to support Woo customers throughout North America. With millions of online stores powered by Woo, this move enables us to help even more small and medium-sized businesses grow and thrive.' Pari Sawant, Chief Product Officer for Elavon, echoed this view: 'This agreement underscores the strength of our secure, reliable, and flexible payment solutions—designed to lower barriers and simplify operations. It reaffirms Elavon's position as a trusted global payments partner, committed to empowering merchants of all sizes with seamless integration and streamlined administration." 'After seeing the strong positive sentiment towards Elavon's payment processing in Europe, we're excited to extend this partnership and powerful solution to Woo customers across North America,' offered Web Griebel, Global Head of Payments at Woo. 'This expansion reflects our continued commitment to collaborating with trusted partners like Elavon to deliver seamless, high-performing payment solutions for merchants.'
Business Wire
a day ago
- Business
- Business Wire
Elavon and Woo Expand Payments Partnership to North America
ATLANTA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Elavon, a global payments leader, and WooCommerce, the ecommerce platform powering more than four million online stores globally, are expanding their successful European payments partnership across the Atlantic to North America. Installing the free-to-download Elavon extension from the WooCommerce Marketplace gives merchants instant access to Elavon's proven payment services, helping micro, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) rapidly grow into additional markets. With a loyal base of more than two million users and a 4.3 Trustpilot customer satisfaction rating in North America, Elavon makes it simple for merchants to scale online. It will directly manage all merchants using the extension, meaning it can offer SMBs in the United States and Canada more value-added services as their businesses grow. Elavon's focus on integrating payments into software brings together a full suite of services for ecommerce platforms and independent software vendors (ISVs) to offer their clients. Elavon Payment Gateway can quickly integrate ecommerce platforms and ISVs to bring secure, fast and compliant payments wherever they are needed. For the last 12 months, Elavon and Woo have delivered secure and speedy online payments for small and medium-sized businesses in Europe. The new deal means merchants in North America join millions of Woo sellers across Europe who are able to access Elavon's reliable, flexible payment solution. Eva Paredes, Head of SMB, UK and Ireland at Elavon remarked, "Having proven the effectiveness of our payment services with WooCommerce merchants across Europe, we're excited to expand our partnership to support Woo customers throughout North America. With millions of online stores powered by Woo, this move enables us to help even more small and medium-sized businesses grow and thrive.' Pari Sawant, Chief Product Officer for Elavon, echoed this view: 'This agreement underscores the strength of our secure, reliable, and flexible payment solutions—designed to lower barriers and simplify operations. It reaffirms Elavon's position as a trusted global payments partner, committed to empowering merchants of all sizes with seamless integration and streamlined administration." 'After seeing the strong positive sentiment towards Elavon's payment processing in Europe, we're excited to extend this partnership and powerful solution to Woo customers across North America,' offered Web Griebel, Global Head of Payments at Woo. 'This expansion reflects our continued commitment to collaborating with trusted partners like Elavon to deliver seamless, high-performing payment solutions for merchants.' Elavon can be downloaded from the WooCommerce Marketplace at: About Elavon Elavon is owned by U.S. Bank (NYSE: USB), the fifth-largest bank in the United States. It provides end-to-end payment processing solutions and services to more than 1.3 million customers in the United States, Europe, and Canada. As the leading provider for airlines and a top five provider in hospitality, healthcare, retail, and public sector/education, Elavon's innovative payment solutions are designed to solve pain points for businesses from small to the largest global enterprises. About Woo Woo is the company behind WooCommerce, the open-source ecommerce platform powering more than 4.5 million online stores. Built on WordPress, WooCommerce offers unlimited extensibility and flexibility for store owners and builders. Woo is a fully distributed company with employees all over the world, dedicated to empowering success for merchants, developers, and anyone else making a living through ecommerce.
National Post
a day ago
- Business
- National Post
Elavon and Woo Expand Payments Partnership to North America
Article content ATLANTA — Elavon, a global payments leader, and WooCommerce, the ecommerce platform powering more than four million online stores globally, are expanding their successful European payments partnership across the Atlantic to North America. Article content Installing the free-to-download Elavon extension from the WooCommerce Marketplace gives merchants instant access to Elavon's proven payment services, helping micro, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) rapidly grow into additional markets. With a loyal base of more than two million users and a 4.3 Trustpilot customer satisfaction rating in North America, Elavon makes it simple for merchants to scale online. It will directly manage all merchants using the extension, meaning it can offer SMBs in the United States and Canada more value-added services as their businesses grow. Article content Elavon's focus on integrating payments into software brings together a full suite of services for ecommerce platforms and independent software vendors (ISVs) to offer their clients. Elavon Payment Gateway can quickly integrate ecommerce platforms and ISVs to bring secure, fast and compliant payments wherever they are needed. Article content For the last 12 months, Elavon and Woo have delivered secure and speedy online payments for small and medium-sized businesses in Europe. The new deal means merchants in North America join millions of Woo sellers across Europe who are able to access Elavon's reliable, flexible payment solution. Article content Eva Paredes, Head of SMB, UK and Ireland at Elavon remarked, 'Having proven the effectiveness of our payment services with WooCommerce merchants across Europe, we're excited to expand our partnership to support Woo customers throughout North America. With millions of online stores powered by Woo, this move enables us to help even more small and medium-sized businesses grow and thrive.' Article content Pari Sawant, Chief Product Officer for Elavon, echoed this view: 'This agreement underscores the strength of our secure, reliable, and flexible payment solutions—designed to lower barriers and simplify operations. It reaffirms Elavon's position as a trusted global payments partner, committed to empowering merchants of all sizes with seamless integration and streamlined administration.' Article content 'After seeing the strong positive sentiment towards Elavon's payment processing in Europe, we're excited to extend this partnership and powerful solution to Woo customers across North America,' offered Web Griebel, Global Head of Payments at Woo. 'This expansion reflects our continued commitment to collaborating with trusted partners like Elavon to deliver seamless, high-performing payment solutions for merchants.' Article content Elavon can be downloaded from the WooCommerce Marketplace at: Article content About Elavon Article content Elavon Article content is owned by U.S. Bank (NYSE: USB), the fifth-largest bank in the United States. It provides end-to-end payment processing solutions and services to more than 1.3 million customers in the United States, Europe, and Canada. As the leading provider for airlines and a top five provider in hospitality, healthcare, retail, and public sector/education, Elavon's innovative payment solutions are designed to solve pain points for businesses from small to the largest global enterprises. Article content About Woo Article content Woo is the company behind WooCommerce, the open-source ecommerce platform powering more than 4.5 million online stores. Built on WordPress, WooCommerce offers unlimited extensibility and flexibility for store owners and builders. Woo is a fully distributed company with employees all over the world, dedicated to empowering success for merchants, developers, and anyone else making a living through ecommerce. Article content Article content Article content Article content
Forbes
2 days ago
- Business
- Forbes
Small Businesses Love AI — But Most Are Missing What Matters
From marketing to discoverability, AI is transforming small business — but what's happening behind ... More the scenes may matter more. It's never been easier to generate a social post, draft a newsletter, or spin up a polished website using AI like it is today. And many small businesses are embracing AI, automating marketing tasks, building faster sites and scaling campaigns that once required full teams. But according to two executives shaping AI adoption for small businesses — Itai Sadan, cofounder and CEO of Duda, and Louis Gutierrez, director of AI at Constant Contact — a more complicated picture is emerging. While the excitement about AI-powered automation is real, most SMBs are not yet ready to combat the challenges that come with using AI. Reality Versus Expectations At Duda, which powers more than a million small business websites, nearly 45% of new sites now use at least one AI assistant, according to Sadan. From SEO optimization to content generation, the tools are being adopted at a striking rate. 'We're seeing this huge uptake, especially in areas like image alt text generation or SEO automation,' Sadan said. 'What used to take hours can now be done in minutes with a single click.' Constant Contact is seeing a similar pattern. Gutierrez noted that many of their small business users are 'doing more with less' — wearing multiple hats, streamlining content workflows and using AI to personalize customer communication at scale. 'AI lets them scale, yes,' Gutierrez said, 'but it also allows them to focus on what they're passionate about and delegate the rest.' But these gains come with a shift in customer expectations. As AI makes marketing faster and more accessible, customers now expect more personalized experiences, faster turnaround and seamless execution. The pressure on small businesses to perform like enterprises — without the same resources — is growing by no small margins. Real Infrastructure Needs While AI appears magical on the surface, the infrastructure underneath is anything but. Gutierrez, who also teaches a course in explainable AI at UT Austin, likened AI models to perishable goods. 'Think of models like a can of beans,' he told me. 'There's an expiration date even if it's not visible. Over time, their performance degrades. And without infrastructure that allows you to update, retrain, or replace them, you're flying blind.' That's why Constant Contact's biggest AI bet isn't a shiny front-end feature but infrastructure. From fine-tuning pipelines to monitoring model drift, the company is building the capacity to stay agile regardless of whether today's dominant model is replaced tomorrow. Sadan sees infrastructure as equally essential. Duda recently rolled out MCP-powered AI copilots that allow users to launch, maintain and edit websites using natural language. In other words, users can now talk to the website builder like they would a human assistant — asking it to update content, fix layouts, or add features just by typing in plain language. But under the hood, it works by chaining API calls, model queries and platform logic into one coherent action layer. 'These are real agentic systems,' Sadan said. 'But if you don't have the data structures, APIs, and schema mapping in place, none of it works. The AI can't fake its way through broken plumbing.' Governance Isn't Optional Anymore Despite the impressive front-end capabilities, both leaders warn that AI without governance is a disaster waiting to happen, especially for small teams with limited oversight. 'At some point, a staff member will drop sensitive customer data into ChatGPT,' Sadan said. 'Not because they're careless but because there are no rules.' Gutierrez agreed, noting that that's why Constant Contact established an internal AI governance committee to vet AI tools for ethics, privacy, security and standardization. The challenge, he explained, isn't just performance. It's what happens when tools fail or deliver biased results. 'Everything's easy when you prototype on your laptop,' he said. 'But the second a model goes into production, it behaves in ways you never imagined. That's where governance matters most.' Without a clear policy, companies risk leaking data, overpromising capabilities, or baking systemic bias into customer-facing tools. And while governance may sound like an enterprise luxury, both executives say it's a small-business necessity. The New SEO War Perhaps the most overlooked trend in small business AI is how people find products and services in the first place. While Google still dominates traffic, Sadan said traffic from ChatGPT citations is 'growing at a staggering pace.' Duda is betting heavily on this shift. In addition to automating SEO tasks, the company is investing in AI discoverability features that optimize websites for how LLMs index and interpret them. From FAQ schemas to product data markup, the goal is to rank in the age of AI-powered search, not just traditional queries. 'This is like the early days of Facebook for businesses,' Sadan said. 'If you understand how to ride the wave early, you can grow faster than your competitors, all for less.' Gutierrez, meanwhile, is watching another shift: Vibe coding — the ability to build full software applications using natural language. 'It's turning non-coders into full-stack developers,' he said. 'In a few years, every small business could build their own CRM or booking system just by describing what they want.' Wielding AI Well Both executives agree: AI won't replace small businesses, but using it poorly could put them at risk. Gutierrez warned against the current trend of overpromising what AI can do. 'I'm in vendor meetings all the time,' he said. 'Too many pitch AI as a magic box that does everything. That's dangerous.' Sadan echoed this sentiment, adding that the biggest mistake small businesses make is adopting tools without evaluating their actual productivity gains. 'Try the tool,' he said. 'If it doesn't make your day faster or your work better, it's not worth it, no matter what the marketing says.' What's missing from many AI adoption stories is restraint. It's not enough to use AI; you have to understand what it's good at, what it's not and how to build around that reality. That means investing in infrastructure, enforcing governance and designing for a future where autonomous discovery and interaction may define who thrives and who doesn't. As Gutierrez put it: 'You don't win by adding AI to your toolset. You win by building a business that knows how to wield it.'
