16 Years of protecting Caribbean businesses from cyber threats

By Gregory Lemmon | Managing Director, UBIQUITY Ltd
Cybersecurity & Disaster Recovery Consultants to the Caribbean

Since founding UBIQUITY Ltd in 2010 I have sat across from many Caribbean business owners after incidents that did not have to happen.

Ransomware that a tested backup would have neutralised. Breaches that a single verification call would have stopped. Data losses that offsite backup would have prevented entirely.

The advice below is not from a textbook. It is from sixteen years of seeing what actually works and what the businesses that never get seriously hurt do differently.

  1. The businesses that never test their backup are the ones that discover it does not work during a crisis.

Not a minor inconvenience. A crisis. Test your backup quarterly. Restore something from it. Time the process. Everything else in your cybersecurity strategy depends on this working when it needs to.

  1. The human in your business can be more susceptible than any software vulnerability.

Every significant breach I have seen in the Caribbean began with a person not a system. A click. A wire transfer. A shared password. Technical controls matter but the most durable protection is a well trained team of humans that know what the protocols are and follow them.

  1. Shared passwords are not a convenience. They are a liability with no owner.

When a shared account gets compromised and they do, nobody knows when it happened, who had the credential or how far the access spread. Individual accounts for every person. Every time.

  1. The businesses that survive ransomware are the ones with offsite backup. Not the ones that paid.

Paying a ransom does not guarantee recovery. It guarantees a payment. The businesses I have seen recover fastest from ransomware had clean, tested, offsite backup that the ransomware could not reach. That is the only reliable answer.

  1. If you do not know who has access to your systems right now neither does your security.

Access management is unglamorous. It is also one of the highest-return security controls available. A former employee whose access was never revoked. An admin account that outlived its purpose. These are the doors attackers walk through while everyone is looking elsewhere.

  1. Friday afternoon is the most dangerous time of the business week.

Business email compromise attacks, fraudulent payment requests and social engineering attempts are disproportionately timed for end of day Friday. Urgency plus fatigue plus the instinct to clear the desk before the weekend. Build a payment verification culture that holds on Friday afternoons specifically.

  1. Hurricane season is not just a physical threat. It is a cybersecurity event.

Sixteen years in the Caribbean has made this impossible to ignore. The post-storm period distracted teams, rushed remote setups, systems coming back online unmonitored is when many of the most damaging cyber incidents I have seen occurred. Prepare for both threats. Every season. Before August.

  1. An incident response plan that has never been practiced is a document. Not a plan.

Walk your team through it. Even once. The businesses that recover fastest from incidents are not the ones with the most sophisticated technology. They are the ones whose teams had already been through the steps before game day arrived.

  1. The gap between what Caribbean businesses think their IT covers and what it actually covers is where incidents live.

IT support and cybersecurity are different disciplines. Knowing this distinction and acting on it is the single most important mindset shift a Caribbean business owner can make about technology risk.

  1. The conversation that happens before an incident is always cheaper than the one that happens after.

I have had both versions with Caribbean business owners. The before conversation is calm, structured and produces a clear action plan. The after conversation happens under pressure with narrowed options. In sixteen years I have never met a business owner who regretted having the before conversation.

Sixteen years. Hundreds of businesses. One consistent truth.

The businesses that come through intact are the ones that made deliberate decisions before something forced the conversation.

That decision is available to every Caribbean business reading this right now.

Contact Us- 

Email: info@ubiquityltd.com

Phone: +1 (284) 547-6754

Calendly Link: https://calendly.com/glemmon-wpi/15min?month=2026-07