It's your Business do you Value it...?
Posted on 6th February 2017 at 10:59
As an IT professional the most important question I should ask you is this…Do you value your business?
The answer I always receive is of course we do, what a silly question to ask…..So why ask the question, the reason is quite simple. I spend my time with businesses small and large, who always answer yes to this question however in reality their actions demonstrate the opposite, especially when we consider their IT infrastructure.
It is very common in business to focus on increasing revenue, driving sales and making money, in doing this we use more and more electronic systems, these systems can of course make us more competitive and reduce our costs, which of course looks good to the bottom line, unfortunately the major downside of this is that rather than people who know our business it is now our electronic systems, these systems contain the information we rely on to do our business.
The problem we have now is that in reality we have placed all our eggs in one basket and we need to ensure we protect those eggs really carefully. In your business these eggs are of course your electronic systems, systems that now contain all your business critical information, you must therefore ensure you have measures in place to ensure that Cyber Criminals cannot easily compromise your systems and data.
Sadly the increase of Cyber Crime compromises on businesses such as yours, are rising as the methods that Cyber Criminals use are quite frankly very ingenious and as businesses we don’t spend the time in training our staff and making cyber awareness a priority.
As a minimum I would recommend spending some time and effort in making sure that we protect the eggs in our baskets, to ensure that should the worst happen we have a spare set of eggs that we made earlier to use, these eggs will be part of your Business Continuity and contained within that would be your Disaster Recovery plan, your Disaster Recovery plan will be specific to you and help recover your business operations from a Cyber Crime attack.
It is very important to emphasise that no two Business Continuity plans will be the same and the cost associated with these plans will be determined by the specific requirements of your business, however these costs should always be value for money and relevant for your business.
So let me rephrase the question…
Do you value your business, the livelihood it gives you and would you like to ensure that should you be hit with a Cyber Attack you could continue to trade?
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