Don’t let the empire strike back

In this case I’m not talking outer space I’m talking office space – or whatever your form your business takes.

Building a business empire takes time, emotion and (let’s be honest) an awful lot of hard work. You start from the ground up (which usually means just you) and scale up to whatever level works for you – with multiple staff members, perhaps multiple sites, maybe even multiple countries. Whatever point your business grows to, its IT systems need to grow with it. But have they?

If you’ve grown but your systems haven’t been adapted to cope with in a secure way, your business empire could be the chink in your security armour. Depending on how far or in which direction you’ve grown, it’s not actually a matter of adapting your systems so much as replacing them altogether, in order to remain safe, secure and prevent a security breach.

To be honest that’s the bare minimum that your systems should be achieving – safety. In reality they should be efficient, easy to use and mean that you can streamline your processes and operations.

This is all in the forefront of our minds at the moment because we’ve recently achieved two certifications – Cyber Essentials and Cyber Essentials Plus. These are based on a government-backed cyber security certification scheme that sets out best practice for cyber security within any organisation and in any sector.

Because every sector is vulnerable to cybercrime, and – in the kindest way possible – most don’t even realise how at risk they are. As an example of this, I was waiting for my MOT the other day and I logged onto their free Wi-fi. I’m often cautious of doing this because they’re generally insecure, but in this instance it wasn’t me I was worried about.

The moment I logged on I had full access to the garage’s entire internal network – which firewalls and security should be in place to stop. But it gets worse. I could see there were devices on the network were insecure. If I had been criminally minded I could have had a field day. Though of course I’m not.

But it gets even worse… When I went to pay I noticed that the card terminal was also on this network – which the banks and card issuers would not have deemed safe, and with good reason.

This is an isolated example but it’s frighteningly common. Luckily, armed with our new Cyber Essentials and Cyber Essentials Plus certificates, we can now be sure that we’re following all the latest best practices, to reduce cyber risk for us and all our clients.