Cybersecurity best practice for SMEs

I speak to many SME business owners who want honest, straightforward and practical cybersecurity guidance. This a simple yet effective, best practice framework that SME business owners or leaders can follow.

This video covers:
What is cybersecurity best practice?
How cybersecurity best practice benefits SMEs
Challenges when adopting cybersecurity best practice

Content in this video:

Hello, by the end of this video you will understand what cybersecurity best practise looks like for an SME, how it will benefit your business and challenges you might face when adopting these best practices.

So what does best practice look like for an SME?
It comes through effective security controls, user education and awareness training and good business continuity planning.

Good security controls for an SME include anti malware software on every computer, keeping computers up to date, using firewalls to maintain network security, using web filtering to block access to malicious websites and using email filtering to blocks spam and malicious emails.

When it comes to security, people can often be the weakest link. For this reason, your need to tell them what to do and what not to do. And you can do this using policies and documented procedures which set out your security posture and through automated user education tools.

If all else fails, having a robust business continuity and disaster recovery plan can help you recover if you suffer a breach.

So what are the benefits of following cyber security best practices?
Well, it gives us the confidence to know that we can conduct our business, identified risks and put in effective counter measures.

And lets be honest, nobody wants to have to notify the Information Commissioners office about a breach of GDPR, or to let their customers know that they have lost their data.

One of the benefits of using automatic tools to implement cybersecurity best practices is that it can all take place with minimal management overhead.

For example, user educational and awareness training can be delivered to their inboxes and online and it all takes place without you having to do anything, providing you with reports on who’s educated, who’s clicking on phishing links.

So what are some of the challenges with adopting cybersecurity best practices?

Firstly, there is a lot of misinformation out there from cyber security vendors. For example, if you were to go out looking for an anti virus package for your business, you’ll see that they all claim to be number 1, they all claim to be using AI. All claim to be using machine learning, and all of the latest buzz words.

It can be difficult for a business owner to know what they need. The solution to this is to look at the data you have, look at the threats to that data, establish the risks and then put together effective cybersecurity controls to deal with each of those risks.

Some of the other challenges with adopting cybersecurity best practices are getting people to change from their existing ways of working, and deciphering the complexity around cybersecurity and information security compliance standards.

If you’re looking to make your business cyber safe, remember to lean on an expert and ask them lots of questions.

Hopefully we have answered a lot of those for your today, but for further information feel free to get in touch for a no obligation consultation.