How a Security Culture Protects Your Business

How a Security Culture Protects Your Business

With experts predicting cybercrime costs for businesses worldwide to increase roughly 15% per year over the next five years, hitting $10.5 trillion by 2025, most companies understand the need for protective measures. Cybersecurity insurance, employee training, network maintenance, and other efforts have become increasingly commonplace. With constantly evolving threats, however, is that enough? Do you have a culture of security in your business, and what, exactly, does that mean?

As an IT security company in Birmingham, AL, we work to protect our clients’ networks every day from external cybersecurity threats.

In our 16 years of business, we have seen careless competitors suffer attacks themselves, often passing on that risk to their clients. Recognizing the seriousness of these evolving threats years ago, we increased both time and resources dedicated to protecting both our business and those of our clients. Today, roughly 25% of our team focuses exclusively on security threats. The security tools we use (our “security stack”) have been carefully chosen by this elite team, even as they are constantly researching new and different tools as various threats emerge. This culture filters down to every employee on our team, including the help desk techs. Our internal security protocols are simply part of doing business in 2023.

What does this security culture look like for a business in another industry?

We have a client, a manufacturing company, that was largely resistant to improving its security posture. They valued our daily help desk resources, but we routinely encouraged them to allow us to upgrade their security measures.  Recently, their largest competitor suffered a ransomware attack, leaving them completely down and unable to work for three weeks. Our client’s CEO called us immediately to discuss and implement our security stack for his business, and he has been crucial in implementing our security plan throughout his company. In fact, he now insists his employees participate in security training, use multi-factor authentication for all applications, change passwords frequently, and incorporate other recommended habits as a condition of employment. The CEO/owner must embrace and drive a security mindset from the top down to all employees for the most effective and successful mitigation of risk. Some aspects of security necessarily involve additional steps and minor inconveniences. Allowing employees to sidestep these, even once, can be the difference between security and a cyber breach.

A healthy security culture is one in which employees understand that a breach affects the entire organization.

They recognize red flags and report all suspicious activity to their IT team. They know that they are likely to be the weakest link and that a single moment of forgetfulness or curiosity just might result in catastrophe if, for example, a malicious link is clicked in an email. The last employee to leave at the end of the day knows to lock the door. Every single employee must also understand the critical role he/she plays in the cyber security of your business.

If your mindset has changed and you would like to take advantage of our free security risk assessment, give us a call or fill out the form here.