Why Cybersecurity
We have all experienced the sheer volume of telephone scams and online attacks. The front line is no longer the firewall, it’s your people who often click on that link.
People in Small to Medium businesses (SMBs) and Not for Profit (NFP) organisations are in the middle of the ever-evolving cybersecurity threat landscape. While we all need to protect our people, assets and data, advice can be confusing and perhaps not focused on the actual problem. To do nothing risks damaging the trust of your customers, people or stakeholders.
The challenges of limited budgets and diverse competition as well as the need to meet regulatory compliance are a reality that many businesses are grappling with.
One good step forward is to assess your cybersecurity capability as it stands today. This will enable you to see if you meet your compliance requirements, and identify and prioritise any gaps before you invest.
Armed with this information, you can then make informed decisions and implement the right measures to mitigate the impact of a cyber event. This also helps identify other possible risks that could impact your organisation.
Why consider Cybersecurity
- The evolving threat landscape: Bad actors are focused getting money from their actions. They exploit new vulnerabilities that happens as software becomes more complex creating undocumented gaps.
- Protect data: As we move to the cloud, your data resides outside of your control, the concentration of data in the cloud makes it a significant target. As exposits focus on going around traditional security, a new approach is necessary.
- Visibility:In most cases breaches are not seen until payment is requested, this can have significant implications for the impacted organisation
- Compliance: Many industries have defined regulations for data protection and privacy. Compliance is essential as penalties can be server and impact your brand, customers trust and stakeholders/investors
Post COVID many organisations face tighter budgets and have focused their efforts on building the business. This can restrict investing in cybersecurity and can drive the following risks.
- Lack of expertise and resources: Limited cybersecurity experienced personnel, to address the many entry points into your business.
- Budget limitations: The share of funds allocated to cybersecurity tools and training competing with other business prerogatives for budget
- Lack of integration and automation: Traditional cybersecurity tools may not see the new threats or allow for automation to ward off cyberattacks
What does a risk assessment do for me?
Risk assessments identify and evaluate potential problems that could impact your data, users, assets and services. It can also assess risks so you can prioritise corrective actions. The key components are:
Risk assessment: How likely something could happen and to what
- How you connect and communicate: What can be targeted
- Identifying risk: Quantify your risks
- Identify gaps: Identify what could be exploited
- Prioritise remediations: Rank risk to impact so you can limit your exposure
Prioritise remediations: Rank risk to impact so you can limit your exposure
- Remediation optionse: What can be done
- Compensatory exposure: What is at risk but cannot be dealt with
- Human factor: How to engage your people to further reduce your risk
Ultimately, Cybersecurity is not a static thing. Your business and its people need to be invested in this journey in order for it to succeed. The so-called bad actors are smarter and more experienced than ever before. These ‘Exploitation Engineers’ focus on businesses that have done little to protect themselves, or use older security solutions, as they are the easiest ones to breach.
To find out more about how we can help, reach out to our team today.
