Sage 50 Canada - Digital Risk Planning: 5 Steps to Improving Cybersecurity

4 minute read time.

"The value of a company, including small and medium-size businesses, lays squarely on the business intelligence it has formed. Bottom line, the loss or theft of your business intelligence would be more costly than any fire.

According to IBM, 4,000 small and medium sized business owners, also known as SMBs, fall prey to a cyber attack every day in North America. Of those attacked, 60% will be out of business in six months if they are not adequately prepared. That's frightening. Let's discuss how to improve your cybersecurity and reduce your financial risk."

Inspired by the wildfires this season, I've remixed the content provided by Dan Weedin. Dan provides excellent tips in his Lynda.com course titled Protecting Profitability by Reducing Financial Risk by Dan Weedin

The 5 Step Process to improving cybersecurity:

Identify the ways technology affects your operations and sales.
- Do you have an online payment processing system (Paya, Stripe or PayPal)?
- Does your company utilize online chat? How much personal identifiable information is stored? Invest time to discover the different routes of entry for a cybercriminal as the foundational layer of it.
Assess specific risk
- Where are you most vulnerable? By analyzing the routes of entry into your systems, you'll be better able to prioritize your next steps.
- Best practice tip: Never log in to a public Wi-Fi like at your local coffee shop. The entry into your mobile device by the criminal sitting three tables over becomes too easy.
Control what you can
- Hire a cybersecurity expert to lock your front door and make it difficult for outsiders to stroll in. Staying current on patching is the easiest and most critical thing any company can do. A patch is a small piece of software that a company issues whenever a security flaw is uncovered. Just like the name implies, the patch covers the hole, keeping hackers from further exploiting the flaw.
- By creating an internal or external patch management system, you're doing your part in controlling who can legitimately enter into your house.
Purchase cyber liability insurance
- Yes it's a thing! Just like you purchase homeowners' insurance to protect your belongings if a thief breaks into your house and steals them, cyber liability insurance protects your assets when cybercriminals steal from you. Cyber liability insurance assures that you don't have to use your cashflow to cover lost property, monitoring costs, and loss of reputation.
- Cyber insurance is available for any business, and the cost is based on your industry, your annual revenue, and your controls.
Monitor your plan
- Just as technology is always changing and evolving, so should your awareness of the danger to your company. Assign the job of technology guru to one of your employees. They should spend 15 minutes a day keeping track of new viruses, new security programs, crises that are occurring to other businesses, and general news.

By having an internal expert, along with your expert consultant, keeping abreast of the concerns around cybercrime, you will be a more ready and resilient organization. Your company uses computers and technology every day to run your business. In fact, technology might be the most critical part of assuring your business is open for business. With the obvious upside that technology brings us, there's also a danger.

Protect your business intelligence

Make sure that you're capturing your business intelligence and storing it in a safe place. It's no different than how you might protect your most valued assets at home inside of a locked safe. Make sure you're not leaving a chance for a criminal to virtually grab and dash away with your information.

It's easier than ever to document things digitally and to keep them around forever. Businesses are more and more dependent on internal intelligence. It's an asset that needs safeguarding and strategic management. While your employees might be the heartbeat, the intellectual property is the brain.