In this mini-episode, Cyber.SC’s Dominic Vogel offers a set of simple, actionable steps to help businesses ensure their data and that which their customers entrust them with is secure, also securing your reputation as a trusted brand.
In this mini-episode, Cyber.SC’s Dominic Vogel offers a set of simple, actionable steps to help businesses ensure their data and that which their customers entrust them with is secure, also securing your reputation as a trusted brand.
Samantha Castro Hey, Samantha here coming at you with another mini episode.
As small business owners, I know we have 700 things we’re thinking about on any given day in regards to running our business. Things that include talking to customers, responding to sales queries, reaching out to potential customers or updating your website with a new marketing campaign - the list is endless. But does your list contain Cyber Security for your Small Business?
Think about it, half if not all of what I just mentioned in that list had to do with something in the digital world. Talking to customers or potential customers, you may do that through email, your website chat, or maybe social media. Updating your website, well - that’s your online presence that a majority, if not all of your customers will be interacting with.
If 2020 has shown us anything it’s that our businesses rely on digital now more than ever. And our customers want to know that they’re interacting with a Trusted Brand. To discuss what that means, let me introduce you to someone.
Dominic Vogel My name is Dominic Vogel, I'm the founder and chief strategist at CyberSC. And we love working with awesome small and midsize organizations across North America.
We decided to focus on small and midsize organizations because we find that to be the lifeblood of any country, both in Canada and in the US. It's amazing people that we love working with. And really, we aim to provide cyber risk leadership to these organizations. Most small midsize organizations have fantastic financial or operational leadership, but they really struggle when it comes to understanding cyber risk management. So that's the void that we like to fill.
Samantha Castro We’ve partnered with Dominic and CyberSC to help them fill that void by taking a look at Cyber Security concepts and giving actionable steps for your small business that will help you thrive in this digital world.
So, back to today’s topic: Are you a trusted brand? Well what does that even mean?
Dominic Vogel Well a trusted brand, especially in this day and age, trust is everything and you know, especially when you have organizations where trust can be broken quite easily for us, especially when it comes to cybersecurity trust is at the core of that. In this day and age of digital transformation and digital and virtual organizations, you need to preserve the digital trust that your clients and customers have in you. And the foundation of that is good cybersecurity.
Samantha Castro So being a trusted brand means that your clients, customers and even employees have confidence in your organization’s ability to protect and secure their data and information. An example is if I fill out my credit card details to purchase something on your website I have the confidence that that information is safe and has a low risk of being compromised or stolen.
But how do I, the customer, know if your small business is a trusted brand? How do YOU know? Here’s Dominic:
Dominic Vogel I think one of the things which we're going to see over the coming years is whether or not an organization or brand - A: if they've suffered a data breach, or publicly known data breach, as well as how many data breaches have they suffered or experienced and what are their responses to that? There's this concept, which I refer to as digital trust. And right now we're in this time period, where you just keep hearing all sorts of data breach stories, and in the mainstream media news. So there's, it feels a little overwhelming. But I foresee over the coming years that this concept of digital trust becoming more important, and that people will gauge how often an organization or brand has been hit by a data breach, and whether or not those brands are doing enough to protect their personal information.
Samantha Castro So an organization or company that has seen less breaches will have a higher trust value, right?
Dominic Vogel Absolutely. You know, I think we're at that interesting sort of tipping point right now where, you know, that's it's not necessarily front and center with a lot of consumers or with other businesses or organizations. But I can definitely see the needle pointing in that direction.
Samantha Castro I can see it too. I mean how likely are you to shop at a place where a company is known for having regular data breaches - that is your information being stolen and perhaps shared with other cybercriminals? Not very likely right? Well it’s the same for your business. If you don’t take the steps to become a trusted brand, your customers, partners, and employees will be less likely to interact with you. It hurts your reputation, your sales and can even impact you to the point where you can’t recover.
So you’re probably like woah, woah, woah Sam. Just because I didn’t have cyber security on my list of things I think about everyday, doesn’t mean all these things will happen. And the question I would ask back to you is - what if you’re wrong? What if by not focusing on your cyber security, you do have a breach and lose the trust of your customers? What would that do to you and your business?
I seriously am not trying to scare you. As a small business, dealing with customer information, this is something you should be thinking about. So I asked Dominic what are some steps that you could take today to start becoming a trusted brand?
Dominic Vogel One of the first things is to really understand that, as an organization, you are a digital or virtual organization. And as such, you can't ignore the data or cyber risks that go alongside that there are so many businesses and organizations that say, well, we're too small, no one's going to target us or we don't have any important data. Why would someone come after us?
That's very 1995 level thinking. You know, it's this is 2020 and every organization unless you're selling tacos, out of the back of a Volvo, every organization is a digital organization. And they have data which can be easily monetized by cybercriminals.
So in terms of those basic steps, the first thing is to admit that you need to do it. Admittance is the first is the first step. And then just what I referred to as doing basic cyber hygiene. So that could include things such as making sure that all your passwords within your organization are secured within a password manager, making sure that you as an organization, leverage multi factor authentication. So that's where you have a username, password, and the one time PIN code, maybe that's a text message that gets sent to a mobile phone, making sure that any of the laptops or desktops that your staff use, they're properly updated and regularly receiving security updates. It just some basic basic stuff, which can go a long, long way to reducing cyber risk.
Samantha Castro To recap: Admit it’s a problem and that you need to do something about it. Got it? Did you admit it?
Alright, next you need to make sure that you have a strong password management - this means that you’re not using the same passwords across multiple platforms and there are great free tools out there like LastPass that you can utilize for your small business that does just this. It helps generate strong passwords and remembers them for you. There’s no more writing your password down on a piece of paper, notebook or having it in a word doc on your computer. It’s time to step it up and use a password manager.
Dominic also mentioned turning on multi factor authentication. An example is if you go to a website, try to login, it’ll then send a text to your mobile phone with a one time code that you can use to then verify that you are who you say you are and then you can login. The reason for this is let’s say someone is trying to log into your account, it’ll send you a verification code on your phone. You realize right away someone is trying to break in and you can stop them from going any further. And that’s all because you set up that multi factor authentication.
And the last step is to make sure your computers are properly updated and regularly receiving security updates. So go into your computer settings, check that box that says automatically update, and you’re good to go. It takes like two seconds and you’ll be that much closer to becoming a trusted brand.
We have all of these steps with links to some of the tools we utilize for our small business on the podcast post for this episode.
I hope you found value in this for you and your small business. We’ll have more Cyber Security Tips like this in the future and if you want more now, go follow Cyber.SC on Instagram at CyberDotSC. That’s CyberDot D-O-T-S-C. You can also listen to their podcast called the Cyber Security Matters Podcast for more content like this.
We’ll be back next time with a full length episode. Thanks for listening!