Most companies understand that at some point they are going to be the victim of a hack or data breach. Just days ago, we saw that even Amazon isn’t immune, when Amazon admitted it had lost names and emails in an incident. As companies look to their service providers for help, it’s imperative to provide meaningful guidance about how to respond when something happens.
The notion that you can bounce back from a cyber security incident gracefully is called resilience. It involves how quickly you can remove the threat and get your company back to a normal state. In a recent study of 1,000 decision makers in the US, UK, France, Germany, and Japan from companies with at least 1,000 employees, Tanium found that a surprising 96 percent of respondents understood that they needed to make business resilience part of their core company strategy, but only 61 percent claimed that it currently is.
Even that number seems a bit high, given how fully unprepared most companies seem to be. Part of your job as an MSP is to not only raise that awareness, but also to help make your clients more secure and prepare them to deal with an emergency when one inevitably occurs.
Obstacles to resilience
According to the report, there were a variety of reasons why companies have issues with resilience. And you’ve probably heard many of them before. For instance, 36 percent blamed growing internal system complexity, 33 percent said it was due to clever hackers, 20 percent blamed siloed systems and 17 percent attributed it to a security skills gap.
The larger and more complex the organization, the more magnified these problems become. It’s hard for any company to stay on top of all these issues. The onus often falls on the providers that these companies hire to help them.
David Damato, Chief Security Officer at Tanium, says that it’s imperative to get these systems under control and to build in business resilience. “Without uniting teams and reducing the fragmentation, teams will continue to invest in new point solutions and ultimately struggle to make the business resilient,” he said in a statement.
It’s therefore up to you as the MSP to begin figuring out how to make this all work. If this study is accurate, and companies are aware of the problem, they will be looking to you for guidance when it comes to making good decisions. It will then be up to you to take the lead on these matters to make your clients safer and more secure.
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