Hiring a cybersecurity team is about finding the right partner to help meet your security goals. You need the right team with the right expertise and the right approach.
We heard from a lot of you that our latest infographic ‘How to Spot a Cybersecurity Pro’ resonated, so we wanted to elaborate on the characteristics that we think are required to be an effective cybersecurity partner.
#1: Seek to understand all aspects of your business before recommending cybersecurity solutions.
Your business is your livelihood and you understandably take it personally.
As cybersecurity professionals, we too are ardently interested in the way your business works. It’s critical for us to understand all aspects of your business to fully assess risk and recommend solutions. Achieving that understanding is at the heart of our business.
Understanding Your Business
The most effective way that cybersecurity professionals do their job is by asking questions. In doing so, we achieve a deeper understanding of your business operations. Minimizing risk requires that we first understand it, and that comes at a cost. Honest, thorough reflection and testing of assumptions are critical linkages in the cybersecurity discovery and value chain. It’s not unlike rolling up your sleeve so the nurse can take your blood pressure, or putting on a gown for that chest x-ray. Cybersecurity professionals ask tough questions and, while we certainly won’t ask you to disrobe, we will work with you to be fully unguarded.
The reasoning is simple. We can only understand risk when we truly embrace the ways that people, processes, and systems connect your business. Hardware, data, and software that power your business are only one component of the risk. Your people, suppliers, and customers are also components in the risk equation. To our adversaries, they are all attack surfaces— vulnerable points of entry — that creative criminals are only too happy to turn against you.
Understanding Your Risk
Like business, risk is highly dynamic. Fluctuations in people, processes, and tools are opportunities for the predator. Cyber criminals count on these changing circumstances, which give them opportunities to introduce things like ransomware, malware, and spyware into your digital systems. For instance, changes in areas like staffing or banking can be exploited. Confidential information changing hands during the hiring or onboarding processes can expose you to risk. That’s why we’ll ask questions about all these things.
Whether you are in the business of selling goods, software, services, or some hybrid business, your data and your team can be exposed to risk in a wide variety of ways. Averting threats is an exercise in strategic planning to stay several steps ahead of threat actors and find preventive solutions. World class cybersecurity is also about learning to expect the unexpected.
The effective Cyber Criminal can actually prove quite creative and eluding their exploits requires at least as much vigilance and creativity as our adversaries apply. To a cybersecurity professional, the questions we ask are tools of our trade and curiosity is one of the superpowers we apply in the fight against cybercrime.
If you have concerns about cybersecurity, or experience an incident, we’d welcome the chance to get to know you, your business, and your risk profile better.
Email me at probinson@igius.com or connect with me on LinkedIn.
