Blog Post

It’s a fact that many small and midsized businesses neglect their cybersecurity. They may do so either because they think their company doesn’t need it or because they are confused by what it entails. Rather than work through that confusion, they choose to ignore it. Unfortunately, the choice to ignore your cybersecurity can leave your business at serious risk of a data breach that will completely ruin what you’ve worked hard to build.

Why risk that outcome when you can have a cybersecurity risk management strategy in place? Working to prevent a data breach or planning for what to do after a breach occurs with Tech Eagles can help ensure your business will survive if a digital disaster strikes.

What Is Cybersecurity Risk Management?

Cybersecurity risk management is the approach to identifying and prioritizing threats to your computer systems and programs to protect sensitive data. You may define cybersecurity risk management as a process that involves four stages:

1. Identifying Existing Risks: You may touch on several risk types when working to identify risks. For example, remote workers accessing your company’s files on their personal computers is a considerable risk. In contrast, remote employees who use only company-issued hardware and software and only access your files after verifying their identity with two-factor authentication are at much lower risk.
2. Assessing Risks: How do these risks currently affect your business, and how will they affect you in the future? Is there potential for these risks to transform into actual problems your company may face in the future? What will happen if this risk reaches your company?
3. Develop Risk Management Strategies: After you’ve identified and assessed the current cybersecurity risk landscape as it relates to your business, it’s essential to plan how you will deal with the risks. Preventative measures are crucial, but what you do after an attack should be just as important to your risk management.

   In the aftermath of a cybersecurity event, your customers or clients will look to you to show them what you’ve done to restore and protect their data after a breach and what actions you take can directly impact your reputation and the future of your business. A company that has a swift response and quickly restores data will have a much better public reception than a company that takes months to address the risk and even longer to regain access to the data.

4. Reviewing Strategies Regularly: Many business owners often neglect this part of risk management after implementing a strategy. However, this is one of the essential parts of the plan because it can help ensure the success of what you’re doing. If you aren’t reviewing your cyber security risks and strategies regularly, you risk leaving or opening up new vulnerabilities in your system that a cybercriminal can exploit.

These four stages comprise an overall cybersecurity risk management strategy encompassing a plan to keep your technologies as safe as possible.

Cybersecurity risk assessment

Cybersecurity risk assessment encompasses identifying risks and assessing what those risks can do to your company in the risk management strategy steps above. This process could help your organization or business determine what IT assets and technologies apply to business objectives or actions and how those things would be at risk if a cyber event occurred.

Cybersecurity risk assessment is not something you can do once and then forget about it. It would be best if you repeated these assessments regularly to ensure your business’s cybersecurity is performing well. Don’t let this seem overwhelming or daunting. When you work with Tech Eagles, we can help you complete your cybersecurity risk assessments and perfect your overall risk management strategy.

Are You Aware of Current Cybersecurity Risks?

With much of the world digitally focused, there are plenty of cybersecurity risks and threats to be on the lookout for, even in everyday email correspondence. Some examples of cybersecurity risks include:

• Human Error, which includes leaving a computer with sensitive data unlocked in a public place or inadvertently participating in a phishing scam.
• Hackers, who utilize their skills to identify weaknesses in your systems and hope to exploit them for their personal gain.
• System Failures, which can cause data loss and other disturbances in work, like losing orders.
• Unauthorized access, another common cybersecurity risk, can be something as simple as a company forgetting to delete the email account of a former employee, leaving that email address open for hackers and other data thieves with access to the company’s sensitive data.

But these risks can also include things you wouldn’t immediately associate with affecting the digital world, like natural disasters. You must consider the risks to your cybersecurity from all angles to have a comprehensive plan for what will happen if something goes wrong.

Zero Trust Cybersecurity Risk Management

Something that has recently become a more popular form of cybersecurity risk management is the Zero Trust method. Adopted by many major entities, like Microsoft and the U.S. government, the Zero Trust cybersecurity risk management strategy only allows users access to programs, data, or other assets after verifying their identity each time they request access.

As the name implies, there is zero trust between the entity and the people trying to access the system. Only employees or people with permission to access the systems can enter, and only after going through the steps to verify it’s them trying to access the sensitive data. This method has gained popularity recently, especially after the high-profile cyberattack on the Colonial Pipeline in May of 2021.

Let Tech Eagles Help You Upgrade Your Cybersecurity Risk Management Strategies

If you are anything like the other small or medium-sized business that ignores aspects of their cybersecurity out of confusion or simply because you think what you’ve got in place is “good enough,” you are already at a greater risk than you may realize. Don’t let cyber criminals get what they want—trust Tech Eagles to help you with your cybersecurity risk management processes and strengthen your systems against threats.