Whether you think it does or not, cyber security affects your company. There are all sorts of threats from email hacking to employee data being stolen. No IT risk should be ignored. If you start to ignore the smaller problems then before you know it you will have bigger problems.
If you are thinking about hiring a cyber security provider or already have one then there are some questions you should ask them so that you get a better understanding of what they can do for you.
What are the top risks my business faces?
Your business needs to prioritize the real risks by identifying security gaps and the impact they can have on your business. You can then ensure the budget to manage these risks is assigned accordingly.
Are you testing our systems before there’s a problem?
It’s important that they perform what’s called “penetration tests” which will test your current setup and help establish if there are any critical weaknesses. You can think of this the same as a real-life fortress or prison. The prison would have done plenty of drills to ensure that people cannot get in out easily. It’s exactly the same for your data/computers. They need to identify where you are vulnerable or where the threats might come from and sort out a defense process for it.
In the event of a data breach, what is your response plan?
The critical difference between businesses that will survive a data breach and those that won’t is the implementation of a cyber resilience strategy, which takes into account incident response planning, business continuity, and disaster recovery strategies to bounce back from a cyber-attack with minimal disruption to the business.
When did you last test our recovery procedures?
I have been a victim of this myself. My website software takes regular backups and I just presumed all the backups were fine and if anything went wrong I would have no issues restoring a backup. Little did I know that the backups were all corrupt until my website was hacked. By the time I realised it was too late and I had lost everything.
Do you offer an effective IT security awareness program?
Social engineering remains a common tactic whereby criminals can break into a network through underhanded methods, by exploiting vulnerable or uninformed employees.
Therefore it’s important to have your staff trained to look out for these tricks – these could be phone calls or dodgy links in emails that pretend to be someone from your work requesting information.
Summary
Outsourcing your IT security is a great way to protect your company. However, like with any outsourcing it’s vital you pick one of the best Computer Support Companies and you stay up to date with your security.