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Cybersecurity is a Business Continuity Issue: Prove Us Wrong
It is Monday morning, an employee reports a suspicious sign-in alert, and leadership is immediately trying to answer urgent questions:
Is this a real attack? What data is at risk? Who responds? Can the business still operate?
While cybersecurity often gets all the attention, it's easy to overlook the fact that security is part of a larger solution set—business continuity—that needs to be addressed so that a business interruption doesn't stretch on for days, or even weeks. Yes, that disruption could be security-related, or it could be something less sinister. Either way, your cybersecurity tools are only part of the solution. Your organization should wrap those technologies with backup and recovery tools, incident planning, clear policies, and other solutions that help your business move forward from an attack with agility.
Key Takeaways
- Cybersecurity is a core component of business continuity because preventing, containing, and recovering from cyber incidents directly affects an organization's ability to keep operating.
- Strong SMB cybersecurity combines people, processes, and technology—including MFA, access controls, employee training, system maintenance, backups, and documented incident response.
- Business resilience is an ongoing discipline. Cybersecurity controls, recovery procedures, risks, and priorities should be reviewed and tested as the business changes.
As we head into Cybersecurity Awareness Month, we'll discuss the relationship between those much-discussed security solutions and the bigger-picture solution set that comprises business continuity.
Five Cybersecurity Fundamentals Every Small Business Needs to be Resilient
Cyberattacks can wreak havoc on an organization, affecting operations, revenue, customer trust, and the ability to serve clients. The cost of even a simple breach can quickly destroy a small business, as research consistently shows. Then there is the recovery period—dealing with insurance, law enforcement, unhappy clients, even more unhappy compliance agencies—it gets complicated quickly.
Last month we explored the idea of having a resilient business. Having the tactics and tools in place to recover quickly from any disruption reduces the impact on your finances, reputation, team, and customers.
But resilience also means taking steps to prevent a disruption. This includes replacing legacy equipment, providing employee security training, establishing effective policies, and crafting your incident response plan. That applies to cybersecurity as well. A resilient business builds a cybersecurity culture and framework before an attack. Effective cybersecurity combines people, processes, and technology—and takes tactical, thoughtful planning. Here are five steps your organization should focus on to start the process of resilence:
Know What You Need to Protect with Cybersecurity and Restore with Continuity
All data is not created equal. For example, some information needs to be highly protected but doesn't need to be restored immediately when your organization faces disruption. One key element of business continuity planning is understanding what data you have, where it lives, how it is used, and its importance. [Learn more about RTO and RPO]
Keep in mind that highly sensitive data needs extensive protection; however, it may not be critical to the initial business recovery processes. For example, personal data, such as employee records and customer payment methods, should be protected at the highest level and are subject to strict compliance standards. But can you run your business without it in the first few days after a disruption? The answer is likely yes.
If you haven't fully audited your business data, customer information, financial records, email, cloud applications, devices, and critical systems—consider this your sign to get that done. Identify the data you have, where it is, who owns it, who uses it, and how it supports your daily operations. From there, you can determine what needs to be protected at what level and what needs to be restored with the most urgency.
Secure Identities and Access Control
If you follow our blog, you're likely sick of us telling you to use strong passphrases and implement multifactor authentication. But we won't stop, can't stop. Here is why: Well-governed passphrases and a strict MFA policy are two of the most effective and simple ways to protect your organization.
Beyond educating your organization about the importance of passphrase and MFA usage—every single app should require both—your leadership team should adopt access control that operates under the least-privilege model. That means your employees should have access only to the information and systems required for their roles. Less is more with this approach, and it is one of the first steps toward the zero-trust access security posture that provides solid protection for your organization.
Key to this model is clear and highly enforced policies for the departure of employees. Prompt removal of access when employees leave or change positions should be clearly outlined and documented—especially if you operate in a highly regulated industry.
Keep IT Systems Protected and Current
One of the biggest cybersecurity mistakes we see organizations make is assuming their technology solutions are up and running correctly when they aren't. Cybersecurity for small business is never "set it and forget it." Whether it's endpoint protection, firewalls, software, policies, or configurations, security requires constant monitoring, updating, refining, and sometimes, retooling. Not only do threats evolve, but the way your team uses technology and applications will change over time, and both can open cracks in your protection.
Are software updates sexy? No. But they are necessary. Unpatched and outdated systems create exactly the type of openings that attackers routinely exploit.
Building those reviews, updates, and clear documentation for both into your daily operations is one of the places where many small businesses struggle. That's why managed services providers often take on those tasks, quietly ensuring your perimeter is secure and monitoring every element of your environment to close cracks before they become gaps.
Prepare Employees to Recognize and Report Risk
Your employees are ready and willing to help protect your organization. But they need simple, practical guidance that keeps security top-of-mind. What they don't need is to be lectured or offered a once-a-year compliance exercise. Ongoing security awareness training is probably the second-easiest step for an organization to take, with huge ROI. Research shows that ongoing employee training can reduce human error, such as clicking on phishing links, by as much as 70%.
Training is a great step but remember that it takes a true security culture to truly limit the opportunity for human error, the number one cause of breaches. That means leadership who keep cybersecurity best practices in the spotlight, an MSP that builds an integrated, multifaceted cybersecurity environment for your business, and a positive, education-first stance that encourages prompt reporting of any suspicious activity.
Craft Your Plan for Containment and Recovery
We talked a lot about recovery in last month's blogs. Having a backup plan is a great first step, but many organizations fail to plan beyond that, and even fewer regularly test their backups to ensure they are working and data and applications are recoverable.
Regardless of your size, all businesses need documented response roles, tested recovery processes, communication expectations, and clarity around critical systems. Formal incident response plans should include an end-to-end process for responding to any cyber attack, but also other types of disruptions. This detailed strategy is best created with guidance from an experienced IT partner, and might be an opportunity for a vCIO project that includes executive-level planning insights that many smaller businesses lack.
The bottom line: Bad things almost always happen when you least expect it and at the worst possible time. You know what we mean. You walk into the office at 9:03 on Monday morning, and who knows what has gone wrong.
Remember: Cybersecurity Is Not a One-Time Project
We want you to have two takeaways from this month and last month:
- Cybersecurity is a key part of business continuity for small businesses, but it works alongside other measures that are needed to both prevent and recover from an attack.
- Business resilience, and cybersecurity by extension, are not a one-time project. Threats, employees, vendors, systems, and business priorities change. That's why ongoing review, testing, management, and planning matter.
Your MSP plays a critical role in helping your business prepare for and navigate any disruption. Not only should they be able to bring fresh perspective and share best practices, but they should also be able to guide your business through a detailed discovery and planning process to create a long-term IT roadmap that supports business resilience efforts. In the meantime, we encourage all leaders to consider these five questions and take your first step toward resilience:
- What information or systems would create the largest disruption if compromised?
- Who has access to our critical applications and data?
- How quickly could we detect and contain a suspicious event?
- Could we restore critical operations, not just files?
- When did we last review these risks against our current business priorities?
The goal is not to predict every threat; it is to build the practical protection and response discipline that keep a bad Monday from becoming a business crisis. When you layer those fundamental protections with well-planned and tested business backup and recovery tools, your organization is in a much better position to weather any disruption, not just a cyberattack.
If you are concerned about your resilience, we have three suggestions:
