IT Security Starts From The Top

Protecting your company information is a board-level responsibility.

The digital world has revolutionized how many of us live and work. The internet, with its more than 3 billion users, is powering economic growth, increasing collaboration, forging innovation, and creating jobs.

Protecting valuable and sensitive information assets is of critical importance to the sustainability and competitiveness of businesses today. It is imperative that companies be active and persistent in their cyber security preparedness. Cyber security is all too often thought of as solely an IT issue, but in reality it is a wholistic strategic risk management issue, that needs to start from the top of the organization.

There are many benefits to adopting a risk management approach to cyber security, including:

Strategic Benefits

Corporate decision making is improved through the high visibility of risk exposure, both for individual activities and major projects, across the whole of the organization.

Financial Benefits

Providing financial benefit to the organization through the reduction of losses and improved “value for money” potential.

Operational Benefits

Organizations are prepared for most eventualities, being assured of adequate contingency plans.

Do you want to bring this to the table to protect your organization from cyber threats? The following is a set of questions which will assist and support your existing strategic-level risk discussions, specifically how to ensure you have the right safeguards and cultures in place.

Key questions for CEOs and Company Leaders

Protection of key information assets is critical.

• How confident are we that our company’s most important information is being properly managed and is safe from cyber threats?
• Are we clear that the Leadership are likely to be key targets?

Do we have a full and accurate picture of:

• the impact on our company’s reputation, share price or existence if sensitive internal or customer information held by the company were to be lost or stolen?
• the impact on the business if our online access and access to our data were disrupted for a short or sustained period?

Exploring who might compromise our information and why.

• Do we receive regular intelligence from the Chief Information Officer/Head of Security on who may be targeting our company, their methods and their motivations?
• Do we encourage our technical staff to enter into information-sharing exchanges with other companies in our sector and/or across the economy in order to benchmark, learn from others and help identify emerging threats?

Pro-active management of the cyber risk at Board level is critical

The cyber security risk impacts share value, mergers, pricing, reputation, culture, staff, information, process control, brand, technology, and finance. Are we confident that:

• we have identified our key information assets and thoroughly assessed their vulnerability to attack?
• responsibility for the cyber risk has been allocated appropriately?
• we have a written information security policy in place, which is championed by us and supported through regular staff training?
  • Are we confident the entire workforce understands and follows it?

Companies benefit from managing risks across their organizations - drawing effectively on senior management support, risk management policies and processes, and a risk-aware culture.

As always, Emerge is here to help. We are offering a free security vulnerability assessment.