Simply put, cyber security encompasses everything businesses (large and small) and individuals require to prevent unauthorized access to networks, devices, and ensuring confidentiality, integrity, and ensuring the availability of information. Without cyber security, it could possibly lead to the disruption of your business operations.
Cyber security includes people, processes, and technology. The people are you, your users, your clients, and your suppliers. The processes include all the things you and your users need to do, and outlines what you and your users should not do. The technology is there to help, using tools to protect your users and systems, tools to identify potential or actual security issues, and to alert, track, and record what is happening to help you respond if a security incident does occur.
Every business owner at some point worries about their company’s cyber security. It can be something that many people feel is outside of what they can control. There will always be hackers out there who love the challenge of trying to break into systems, so what is a business owner to do?
Having good cyber security hygiene helps ensure your company is proactively ready to deal with an incident, rather than reactively responding to an incident without any type of game plan or response capabilities already in place. If you think of it the same way you think of physical security, good hygiene is the door that you always lock, the alarm you always turn on at the end of the day, and the camera system that is always watching.
Every company will deal with some type of cyber security incident at some point and time, how that incident impacts your business is entirely up to you and the approach you choose. There is a scary stat out there that says 60% of small businesses will permanently close 6 months after a data breach. You don’t want to be part of that majority. It helps to learn about two different approaches to cyber security.
You can choose to take either the proactive/preventative approach, or the reactive approach. By being proactive,
- you take steps to try and prevent an incident,
- you assume something will happen at some point in time
- you prepare for how you will deal with it.
Having those proactive systems in place also helps to provide you with accurate instant information detailing what happened and why. For those who choose the reactive path,
- they assume nothing will ever happen
- if/when it does, they scramble to determine what happened, how it happened, and most importantly what they need to do to respond.
When you look at those two very different scenarios above, which side of an Incident do you want to be on? Do you want to be on the proactive/preventative side where if/when an incident occurs, it’s an annoyance or inconvenience, or on the reactive side where your business may never fully recover from an incident or may incur significant costs and impacts?
Being proactive about your company’s cyber security is the better choice in the long run to help keep your business running. Call on QuickProtect to help lessen your worries about cyber security. QuickProtect’s proactive approach to cyber security can help save your business the time, money and loss of reputation that often comes with a reactive approach to a cyber incident.
