How tight is your security?

Why security is key to keeping customers happy, complying with the law and protecting your clients.

With the advent of GDPR and the inexorable march towards digital transformation, the picture of cyber security is changing. Is your organisation prepared?

The UK government’s 2019 Cyber Security Breaches Survey suspects that GDPR has been a huge boon to cyber security in the last year.

It has been a primary driver behind the large uptick in organisations updating their cyber security policies, but there is plenty more to be done for organisations to protect themselves in an increasingly hostile digital environment.

So what are the next steps?

The government report urges businesses to increase board-level involvement in cyber security, plan for incident response, and monitor suppliers but uptake for these measures is reportedly low: 18% of businesses currently require their suppliers to adhere to cyber security standards, 35% have a board member or trustee with specific responsibility for cyber security, and 16% have formal cyber security incident management processes in place. This presents an opportunity for forward-thinking organisations to steal a march on competitors and boast their commitment to cyber security.

ThreatCloud’s real-time map illustrates the scale of bombardment coming from across the globe, regularly showing more than 20 billion global cyber attack attempts per day. This begs the question: how likely is it that any one of these could target your organisation?

There is some level of clarity to be found in the government’s report: 32% of businesses identified security breaches or attacks within the last 12 months. Of those, 48% reported at least one breach or attack per month; a worryingly large proportion of UK organisations targeted by cyber crime.

Attacks that manage to penetrate an organisation’s defences are having more severe financial impact than before. Today’s organisations don’t just have to contend with the direct impact of the threat but also steep fines from regulators (the maximum GDPR penalty is currently £17.5m or 4% of global turnover). So far British Airways has received a fine totaling £183m for failing to meet GDPR standards, and hotel chain Marriott received a fine of £99m for failing to protect hotel guest data.

This poses a major risk to organisations of all sizes, without taking into account the cost of downtime, technical investigations and recovery, notifications, legal and regulatory activities, and the cost of lost business from a damaged reputation - a 2018 IBM study on Cybersecurity, taking all these factors into account, estimates the average cost of a data breach to be $3.86m.

These sobering statistics are doubtless responsible for the interest in ‘cyber insurance’ which exists to protect organisations from potentially devastating costs incurred from such breaches (at present around 11% of UK businesses currently have a cyber insurance policy).

Organisations that adopt digital transformation are reaping the benefits of increased productivity and revenue, but with it comes an increased threat surface. Companies need to roll cyber security into every aspect of digital transformation to truly realise the potential of the project, or else face taking one step forward and two steps back through costly data breaches.

Data offers valuable business insights crucial to growth. To beat the competition and maintain access to such data, organisations need to ensure they are protected.

This goes some way to explain the reason why 49% of UK businesses outsource their cyber security management to trusted third parties. With 24/7 monitoring outsourced, organisations are free to focus on core business problems.

Take a look at our Security Solutions to find out more.

We know it’s daunting, but the opportunities offered by watertight security easily outweigh the costs and inconvenience. We’ve helped dozens of organisations unleash their business with secure solutions that help them reach their full potential, without the risk of cyberattacks.

Approved Food is one such firm. The budget food retailer is a challenger brand competing with the likes of Tesco and Sainsbury’s. By helping founder Dan Cluderay move his systems to the cloud and increasing security measures, we future- proofed Approved Food for the years ahead.

Dan says, “Our business relies on its use of technology to maintain and scale, as well as ensuring we have security, resilience and backup wrapped around our operation.”

To future proof your business, it pays to make sure your cyber security measures up.

Ready to take the next step? Talk to our team about your security needs or you can read more about Approved Food and their digital transformation.