If the pandemic has taught us anything, its that complacency will bring you unstuck eventually. Just ask your colleagues in Victoria at the moment. But for a moment, I want to introduce the notion of complacency around Cyber-Risk. There’s a reason they call them computer viruses… they’re contagious, easily and imperceptibly passed on, they’re hard to eradicate and they make your business feel rotten
Cyber-risk is real. Just look to JBS Meat processing at Longford. As we write hundreds of Tasmanian employees are stood down through no fault of their own while JBS deals with a global scale event. The local ramifications are huge, employees stood down, animals needing temporary relocation, transport stoppages and local supply lines affected.
BY now, a year into the pandemic, we’ve come to expect that businesses have a COVID-19 Safety plan, and also COVID outbreak containment plan. Transfer that same thinking to your Cyber Risk profile. Do you have similar plans in place? Are you ready for a cyber ‘event’ out-of-the-blue?
- Do you KNOW how to recognise an outbreak and contain it if (when) it occurs? What about your staff, do they know?
- Do you have a culture where reporting potential risks is encouraged? I once had a client whose staff member feared reporting when they’d clicked on a bd link in an email, for fear of losing their job over it. Had the event been reported earlier, we could’ve saved a lot of grief.
- Do you have a bullet-proof data protection strategy in place. I used to counsel clients with a simple plan : 3 copies of the data, stored in 2 different formats and 1 copy off-site and disconnected from everything. 3-2-1 and you could recover from almost anything…. Got anything. Like that setup?
Our post COVID economic recovery is dependent upon business prospering. That’s self-evident, and if business recovery is to continue, it MUST therefore be digital-resilient. A business halted because it’s been shut down by a cyber event, is of little use to anybody – its owner, it’s patrons or the community in general. So a cyber-risk plan is needed for all businesses – large & small.
The Chamber is working with Gold Member The Project Lab to help shape their Cyber-Up Program. Take a look at the program and we encourage businesses in Launceston with less than 199 employees to register their interest. We’re also working with TAS Tafe to assist with shaping their Cyber Risk training courses within their IT streams, ensuring that graduates are real-world work-ready; with skills to match.
And.. we have many Quality IT providers within the Chamber membership that can assist with developing your Cyber Risk management plans. Pick up the phone and get them working for you. Do nothing, and be assured, complacency will do you in, sooner or later.
Eaglecrest Technologies
The Project Lab
AQ Advisory
Another IT Group
Launceston IT
Link Technologies Tasmania