How to Use Cyber Security Awareness as a Competitive Advantage

By 2025, cybercrime is expected to reach damages of $10.5 trillion globally. Organizations around the world are noting this, just like you should. Between the years 2021 to 2025, cybersecurity spending across the globe will climb over $1.75 trillion cumulatively.

Cyber security awareness is a popular business aim, high on the list of priorities. Now, how are you leveraging it as a competitive advantage?

If you are not, you are really missing the boat on some major opportunities. Here is why.

Productivity

The Canadian government reports that 97.9% of their businesses are small businesses. Small businesses employ approximately 68.8% of the private labour force.

The biggest challenge with cyber security is that large corporations have the budget to invest in it, while small companies view it as something that would be nice to have, but won’t make the budget. Therefore, 97.9% of Canadian businesses may not make cyber security a “must-have” priority.

Cyber security means business continuity, giving your business (big or small) the upper hand in production. All businesses should prepare for hackers with fail-safes. Organizations need to prepare for disaster recovery and create protection from troublesome employees.

Public Relations

A breach in security can be a PR nightmare for any company, and possibly even put them out of business completely. How do you believe a potential customer will view your organization if they feel your organization lacks data protection? Will a customer want to do business with you if they fear their data is unsafe?

As a competitive advantage, with your public relations, show that you mean business for cyber security awareness. You want to let your clients and prospects know you take data protection seriously, more so than your competitors.

Marketing Advantage

You can build a brand image and an entire marketing campaign around the measures you are taking for data protection. No matter what industry you serve, and whether you sell B2B or B2C, your customers will appreciate your efforts and love doing business with you for it.

Employee Retention

When you lock down your company’s data and keep it away from cybercriminals, you can also keep it away from your competitors too. An example is when a salesperson jumps ship and gets hired by a competitor. You do not want your intellectual property in the hands of your competition.

There are IT security measures you can take to avoid this. You can implement software, configurations, and policies as a preventative measure.

IT Tips

What else can you do to protect your business from malicious actors? Work with an IT provider and ask how they protect your email, edge, and endpoints. Specifically, ask about:

• Next-generation firewalls
• Universal threat management devices
• Antivirus software and beyond, like deep learning
• Spam filtering
• Click protection

Work with an IT provider that can help with training and education for your users in the business. You can run tests too, to see if your employees can spot a phishing email.

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plan

If you do not have a plan in place already, you will need a plan immediately. Any delay puts your business at risk.

An important piece of data protection is having the ability to reverse time. Again, if you cannot quickly and easily turn back the clock for the complete system, you may risk significant damage in case of a cyber attack. In fact, an attack may render your business unable to operate.

Image-based backups can help. They take snapshots hourly of your system. They back up in two locations that are totally separate, with an operating system that differs from what your business uses daily.

The reason for this is that a virus can spread when using the same operating system. Having a different operating system as a backup adds a layer of protection.

Use Data Encryption

Any business can encrypt its data today with the rollout of modern technology. There are multiple programs available that will encrypt and decrypt your data, simply, for emails, files, and hard drives.

Speaking of hard drives, if you have old devices, you will want to do one of the following:

• Shred-it so it is unreadable
• Magnetically clean the disk
• Use a software that will wipe it clean safely

Keep in mind that data protection does not require a genius to do it, but it needs a company with the right tools and training for success.

Stay Up to Date with Patches and General Software Updates

The sooner you make updates, the sooner you can feel more confident about cyber security and digital safety. Unfortunately, hackers love software vulnerabilities. It is how they thrive.

A software vulnerability in a software program or operating system is a weakness or security hole. Hackers use it to their advantage and write malware to target the vulnerability. Opening a compromised message, visiting a rogue website, or playing infected media can be an entry point for an employee to exploit your system.

Malware will steal data. The hacker can now control the device and encrypt files.

When your business devices continually update their software, including patches, it is a way to cover security holes. This keeps hackers out.

Cyber Security Awareness Means a Competitive Advantage

If you are not currently using cyber security awareness to grow your business, you can leave money on the table. Whether it is for productivity, public relations, marketing, employee retention, or in case of a disaster, cyber security matters to your business.

At The Driz Group, we are your trusted partner for cyber security and compliance. We reduce risk to your business with web application protection services, fully managed infrastructure, and delivery of cyber security consulting.

Big or small, The Driz Group can help your business. Contact us today to learn more.