Building your organisation’s cyber resilience is just as important as building up your cash flow. Both are essential to business success, but while most businesses keep an eye on the financials, they tend to think cybersecurity is something they can set and forget. Unfortunately, cybercriminals are constantly coming up with new methods of attack and the security you had in place yesterday may not be sufficient today.

Instead of reacting to breaches and taking on the costs of downtime, lost files and destroyed trust, a regular security assessment can identify vulnerabilities and blind spots that place you and your organisation at risk. Once you know about these, you’re able to proactively implement adequate safeguards before becoming the next victim of a cyber attack.

A robust cybersecurity assessment should encompass a number of key elements:

1. It should be tailored toward the particular details of your business: its size, its number of employees, its industry, and its technology needs.
2. A degree of independence – your current IT provider or someone employed as your in-house IT guy is less likely to provide you with a full ‘warts and all’ report that potentially exposes some of their short comings.
3. It should be based on recognised frameworks covering all aspects of cyber risk. This includes aspects of human risk (how savvy and aware are your staff and what risk do they pose). It also need to cover off process risk (do you have robust policies in place to offboard ex-employees, do you ensure only users that should have access to business data, have access).
4. Due to the dynamic nature of cybersecurity and the pace of change it goes without saying that you need to engage someone with up-to-date specialist cybersecurity knowledge.

Assessments generally begin with a questionnaire, followed by a consultation to better understand your unique cybersecurity requirements. Depending on the depth and detail required, often dictated by regulatory requirements, more detailed technical analysis will also be completed to provide an accurate set of findings and recommendations.

Do any of these resonate?

• Any amount of downtime would cause considerable disruption
• If customer information was made public our reputation has the potential to be significantly tarnished
• I can’t accurately assess our current risk levels
• Not all staff are particularly IT savvy or security conscious
• I don’t have cyber insurance or don’t understand all the fine print and potential exclusions
• We haven’t focused on or invested in cyber security to protect against various forms of new threats

Odds are that wherever you are on your Cyber Resilience journey you could make significant improvements to reduce the risk to your business.

What to do with your assessment results?

While the outcomes of some cyber assessments tend to end up in presenting you with a long list of issues and problems leaving you feeling overwhelmed.  Our approach ensures you have a baseline to measure your risk profile and future improvements via our ‘Cyber Resilience Score’. You’ll know exactly what your current risk profile is, what your target Resilience Score should be, your options and alternatives for improvement and perhaps most importantly, which actions should take priority.

With your baseline score and a ‘Cyber Resilience Roadmap’, you will be well informed to make smarter future security investments focused on the high-payoff areas. You’ll also be able to track and report on progress and improvements over time knowing exactly what you’ve done well and where your security risks remain. Employees will see how much you value security, which helps to create a stable culture. You’ll also be able to report your commitment to customers, confirming they’re making the right choice by staying with you.

Interested in a Cyber Health Check for your business – give Steve a call on 0800 694 862.