When your computer goes down, your day tends to go down with it. A computer infection can cause your productivity – or worse, the productivity of your whole business – to crash rapidly. And according to a recent study, too many Americans are familiar with this feeling.

Consumer Reports’ Annual State of the Net Report indicated that in the past year, 52.8 million American adults had at least one malware infection affect their home PC; repair costs for those damages climbed to nearly $4 billion. An additional 9.2 million Americans were victims of phishing schemes, and heavy spam faced 43 percent of those surveyed.

Sixty-two percent of people who had been infected with malware said they relied on antivirus software, while 17 percent said they felt comfortable verifying a malware issue themselves and 15 percent said they would rely on someone else to verify it for them. Unfortunately, the numbers don’t correspond to a successful rate of computer protection this past year.

“Our Annual State of the Net Report revealed that home computers are no safer than they were last year,” said Jeff Fox, technology editor for Consumer Reports.

With this reality in mind, more and more businesses are moving to managed service providers to avoid issues. Managed service providers boast numerous protection features to keep malware from impacting home or business performance, including cloud-based data backup, website hosting, and professional network monitoring to stop problems before they start.

Apex Technology Services is a leading provider of managed services, benefiting clients in safety and cost efficiency. Apex offers a variety of best-of-breed managed services from cloud services to hosted email to online backup to network monitoring. For more information or to get started today, click here.