The importance of culture plays a critical role with cybersecurity and your small business. Many small businesses can trace the origins of a successful cyberattack against them back to a click of a link in an email. Sometimes even having the right cybersecurity technology in place is not enough. So what can a small business do?🤷🏽♀️
Cybersafe culture
When developing cybersecurity for your small business it is important to examine the culture of it. What is the attitude toward changes, toward cybersecurity? Does leadership have a desire to embrace cybersecurity to allow it to be successful? Having a cybersafe culture requires discipline, complete buy-in from the top down, and a great amount of effort.
People
This one seems obvious, people help make your culture. So knowing this, what do your employees like or dislike, how do they learn best, how do they perform best? They probably like stability, predictability, and good clear communication. So when instituting any new cybersecurity program it is important to keep these three things in mind.
Process
Have you ever received an email from a “coworker” requesting you to perform a normal business process, like send me the tax information for our employees so they can upload them into the new system? Or have you received an email stating you need to update your direct deposit information as the system being used is changing? If so, these may actually have been phishing emails called business emails.
These are common phishing emails and if you do not have strong business policies in place that explain your business processes, it is easier to fall victim to them. Policies play a critical role in creating your cybersafe culture. Policies set expectations and provide guidance for how your employees are supposed to perform.
Technology🧑🏻💻
Lastly, technology plays a key role. Having cybersecure technology can help minimize your cyber risk. Having the technology alone is not enough though, you need to properly train your employees on using it. This will help them feel comfortable with it.
Introducing new technology can be stressful, especially if you introduce too many new technologies at one time. As we mentioned above, stability and predictability are two things employees like, so keep that in mind when deploying new tech.
For more on cybersecurity check out Small Business Big Threat!