Over the past six years, cyberattacks have increased 30% worldwide.¹ The growing number of attacks is alarming, especially given that many of them are preventable. If your business doesn’t have a strategy in place, you’re not alone. Most organizations fund cybersecurity only on the heels of a breach, but it’s important to plan and prepare ahead of time.

A data breach is more than a PR nightmare for your organization. Business leaders face customer turnover, organization disruption, system downtime – the list goes on. A typical breach costs small to medium-sized businesses (500-1,000 employees) more than $3 million in fines, or an average of $35,533 per employee. ¹

We partner with businesses of all sizes to educate your team and implement appropriate security precautions. We work to understand the ins and outs of your business, so your company and employees are fully prepared in the event of an attack. Here are the three key practices to help you prepare for a cybersecurity attack and reduce the potential impact.

Be proactive
Initiating change before problems occur saves your organization time, money, and effort. A proactive approach is fiscally responsible, especially considering the average cost of a security breach in the United States is $8.19 million.¹ An effective cybersecurity strategy minimizes the risk of a breach and allows for straightforward navigation during and following an attack. Proactivity makes containing a breach possible, ensures less overall impact, and increases insurance coverage. If you think you’re safe because of your size or industry, think again. In the digital age, all companies and industries are vulnerable. One in five small businesses fall victim to a cyberattack and of those, 60 percent go out of business in six months. ²

We align business and cybersecurity strategies with digital applications. So you can rest easy knowing you have enhanced security posture guarding your systems.

Realize both human error and technology cause breaches
Experiencing an online attack damages your bottom-line. 84 percent of cyberattacks are caused by human error i.e. easy passwords, physical devices left unsafe, or failing to apply patches.³ Employees, even those with the best intentions, are the weakest barrier for cybersecurity. Unfortunately, good intentions aren’t enough to prevent a breach. A lack of education combined with phishing scams open the door for 80 percent of breaches.¹ Employees need training to understand how to identify malicious phone calls, emails, insecure network connections, and best practices for passwords. All of these risks are easily addressed with a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy.

Our experts help to protect your company from both technology and human-error related incidents. We mitigate risk through building a technology that decreases the attack surface area and provide accompanying change-management processes. Communication plans, mock phishing attempts, cybersecurity training, and re-training plans work in tandem to keep your employees informed and prepared.

Implement change management
Successful cybersecurity strategies implement change management. If you are attacked before implementing a cybersecurity strategy, one of the most important steps following an attack is to support change management. That includes organizing an internal incident response team to extensively test the cybersecurity strategy. And it’s worth the time and effort. Internal incident response teams save a company an average of $1.2 million.¹ They’re able to respond quicker to attacks and contain breaches sooner.

Extensive training in the form of mock-phishing attempts followed by security awareness training for employees who were “phished” solidifies employee behavioral change. We implement successful cybersecurity strategies by training employees to manage new practices. This process allows employees to understand why the changes are occurring – and why it’s important for each individual to implement the modifications.

Let’s get to work
A successful cybersecurity strategy doesn’t have to be tedious. Collective Insights eliminates uncertainty and creates a strategic plan for your entire organization. We prepare you for an attack, so there are less costs on the backend. We train clients to handle a breach and know what steps to take by creating change management plans that prepare employees for potential attacks. Partner with our team to get started on a custom strategic cybersecurity plan for your business.

Contact us at www.collectiveinsights.com/contact-us to learn more. We are your partner in both cybersecurity and change management.

Source:

¹ Cost of a Data Breach Report. Ponemon Institute. IBM Security. 2019.

² 60 Percent of Small Businesses Fold Within 6 Months of a Cyber Attack. Here’s How to Protect Yourself. Inc. 2019.

³ MIT Sloan Cybersecurity