Skip to main content

Your Board and risk management

Your Board and risk management

For small business owners, it may seem your daily energy is caught up with just keeping the doors open and revenuescoming in. However, unless you were very fortunate when you started up, you have a board of directors; most likelyinitial investors whose focus is on the long term success of the company and on strategies for future growth. Part oftheir concern will be threats and risks to the present business. A particular concern may be the risks to the businessin the case of a cyber attack. Small businesses are just as vulnerable to cyber attacks as large companies. However,they are far less likely to have the resources to recover.

In our next few blogs, we are going to look at what ways a small firm may be vulnerable to a cyber attack. Inparticular, we discuss the major areas of vulnerability your business faces.Specific topics include customer and companydata loss, legal implications, fines and regulatory penalties, brand damage, downtime and revenue loss, and supply chainvulnerabilities.

Obviously, your shareholders want to understand how you plan to defend against and respond to cyberthreats, but that's atopic for another e-guide. Today, we will talk about educating your board about one area that you are at risk for when acyber attack occurs.

Downtime

This is the most obvious and immediate consequence of a cyber attack. Your business becomes partially or fully shutdown.Given our reliance on technology, almost every aspect of a business, even a small service business is, in some way,reliant on technology. For example, a medical office can’t function if its reservation system is attacked. Staff maylose the basic ability to know which patients are scheduled for the day. A smaller retailer can’t ring sales if the POSgoes down. If your website is attacked and compromised, that’s akin to shutting down the doors of a brick and mortaroperation.

Why is this a shareholder topic? Downtime places the entire organization at risk of failure. Small businesses are muchless likely to recover than are large businesses. Your Board will want to be informed about how you propose to keep theorganization safe.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Leveraging your business data to drive better business outcomes

Leveraging your business data to drive better business outcomes Smaller firms may hear about AI and how data is driving the big corporations of the world, but they often don’t realize that they can do the same. The size and age of your business doesn’t have to be a limiting factor in whether you use data. Today’s blog is a quick look at data management for the small firm. The first lesson is: don’t take your data for granted. The basic business model for some large IT companies is monetizing the data that they collect. While this may not be your goal, you probably collect a great deal of data about your customers, prospects, and operations. An MSP can help you make better use of that data. Here are just three examples: Marketing Data tells you who is interested, when they're interested, and in what they are interested. Data can tell you where each individual prospect sits in the sales funnel, so your marketing messages reach them exactly where they are. It can also track the...
Post a Comment
Read more

How Can an MSP Keep Your Business Safe?

How Can an MSP Keep Your Business Safe? Are you a small- or medium-sized business that is in need of a more complete, dependable IT solution to support your business than you presently have? When your main focus is running your business, everything else becomes an afterthought. Other support operations tend to take a backseat. However, your business depends upon a reliable, stable “always running” IT infrastructure and you probably find that isn't always the case. Even if you have an in-house staff, it isn't large enough to put out fires and handle strategic planning and provide 24/7 support when something goes wrong. That is why many businesses large and small rely fully or partially on the support of a Managed Service Provider (MSP). So what are the typical services available from an MSP? There are many different types of support that can be provided to clients. In this e-guide we will break them down. Managed IT Services This is the overarching set of services that ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Like it or not, you business relies on technology

Like it or not, your business relies on technology Technology isn’t just something used by Silicon valley firms and large corporations. Even the smallest start-up is now reliant on technology and the virtual marketplace. A business cannot function without operating in the digital world. At the very least, it means having a website, a social media presence and an online database of customers and prospects. Most likely it means conducting business online, which means you’re responsible for the security of client data: names, credit cards, addresses, and probably more information. Much of that information may be personal Information that you have an obligation to keep secure. That duty brings along many challenges because cyber criminals and even benign human error could mean that data is compromised. Data breaches can bring litigation, possible regulatory sanctions, and very importantly, damage to your brand and reputation. Because so much rides on the stability and security of your di...
Post a Comment
Read more