Cybersecurity Awareness for Today’s Small Business, Week 4

Our goal duringCybersecurity Awareness Month has been to help you make cyber risk management a priority in your company with tools and resources to help keep your company’s and your customers’ data safe. And as your business grows and you go after bigger opportunities, those enterprise customers inevitably will be concerned with your information security—and your vendors’ respective security protocols.

Have you been asked by a potential customer to achieve your SOC 2 attestation or ISO 27001 certification?If you have not, you likely will—and soon. While achieving either or both of these is certainly important—even required—to assure customers and clients that they have data protection protocols in place, it is not the sole indicator of being cyber secure, as certifications will not mitigate the risk of a cyberattack.

With that in mind, here are three integrated steps to a complete cybersecurity program:

1. Understand risk.

Running vulnerability risk assessment scans should be on a frequent cadence and on an ongoing basis. According to one source, organizations that scan with a steady cadence remediate flaws on average 15.5 days faster.

Types of scans include the dark web (frequent), internal and cloud environment scans (weekly), and external scans (monthly).

For a complete guide to vulnerability risk assessment scans, download our ebook.

2. Mitigate risk.

Once you understand your risk with regular vulnerability assessments, the next step is to mitigate the opportunities for cyber threats by prioritizing according to risk severity and repairing the most severe areas of vulnerability.

Ask yourself, "What is the impact of a given vulnerability to our bottom line, our operations, and our company's reputation?" Cross reference the size of impact with the highest threats and fix those areas first.

This brings us to the final lesson in our Cybersecurity Awareness Month #BeCyberSmart campaign.

3. Transfer risk.

What if, after taking all of the measures we have discussed about ensuring cybersecurity in your company, a breach happens anyway? Unfortunately, no system is ever 100% secure and there will always be residual risk that you want to transfer with cyber insurance. Carrying cyber insurance is critical in making sure your financial assets are protected and that your business can recover successfully and with minimal interruption.

Get a fast quote comparison and advisory services from Trava’s licensed insurance brokers to help you get the right coverage at the best available price.