Member Article

Tips to protect your business from cyber attacks

Newcastle businesses are at an increasing risk of cyber security breaches, says Mick Keeble, Head of Managed Services at Perfect Image. Here, he discusses some of the headline grabbing stats coming out of the IT provider’s Customer Conference Day, and what you can do to help protect your business from harm.

Christmas may seem like a distant memory now that we’re well into February, but just before the festive break, Perfect Image hosted it’s second Customer Conference Day – an annual event where we invite our customers and other contacts to come along to our offices and hear talks from guest speakers in the IT industry, meet some of our vendors, and have a chat with our team of experts about how we may be able to help them realise business benefits through the intelligent use of IT.

So while Christmas is now but a distant memory, one thing that clearly stands out in my mind from our Customer Conference Day was the talk given by Asam Malik from Price Waterhouse Cooper, about cyber security and how breaches can dramatically affect your business. It’s true that breaches to cyber security happen all day, every day, but hearing just how close to home it is and the number of Newcastle businesses that are suffering or have suffered as a result is staggering.

In the ‘Global State of Information Survey 2016’ carried out by PwC, of the 10,040 respondents, 4,711 admitted that there had been some form of security incident involving their IT systems over the past year. That’s a whopping increase of 38%, meaning the threat of an attack is most certainly getting bigger. So why is this happening?

Essentially, it’s down to the rise of mobile technology and people being the weakest link. Think about it, we use our personal smartphones and tables to log onto our work emails, access intranet systems and so on.

We’re opening ourselves up to harm and literally welcoming the hackers into our businesses – a scary thought considering the cost of security breaches.

Data is often one of an organisations’ biggest assets. According to PwC, in Newcastle and the surrounding area, 93% of surveyed businesses lost data due to security breaches. That’s the highest number in the whole of the UK. So how do we tackle such a huge and ever growing problem?

Cyber security needs to be higher on every business’ agenda and should be discussed and strategized at board meetings. Today, 45% of large UK organisations have a Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) but this doesn’t go far enough.

The topic of a business’ cyber security needs and ownership shouldn’t be spread across several people within one organisation. Rather, one person needs to be in charge and report in directly to the CEO of the company.

Then think about your mind set. Don’t think about ‘if’ a security breach is going to happen, presume it’s already happened and you don’t know about it. How dangerous could that be to your business? Think about what your sensitive data is and who has access to it? These types of questions are bound to make you want to take action – and quickly! So if prevention is better than cure, what steps do you need to take to protect yourself?

Asam recommended during out Customer Conference Day an eight-step plan to give you the best chance of avoiding (or at least limiting the risk of) a cyber security breach and also some actions to consider should the worst happen:

1. Create a cyber strategy and gain buy-in from the board.
2. Regularly undertake ethical hacking exercises (and not just a software scan!).
3. Understand what your sensitive data is and who has access to it.
4. Put IT security policies in place.
5. Regularly review your IT security.
6. Have one person in charge of cyber security in your business – a CISO.
7. Make your staff aware of the dangers of cyber security breaches and provide training accordingly.
8. Conduct a cyber security crisis management – think about what could happen in the event of an attack, how you would need to respond, and practice a drill so everyone is familiar with the protocol.

There’s no doubt cyber security is a ‘hot topic’ at the moment and the stats presented by Asam suggest this problem isn’t going to go away – it’s just getting bigger – especially in the North East. If you’d like to find out more about how the team of experts at Perfect Image can work with you to protect your business, visit: www.perfect-image.co.uk for more information.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Perfect Image .