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Perhaps that question ought to be “why do we exercise?” We exercise to keep ourselves fit and healthy. To help keep our bodies in good condition and ready for whatever life throws at us. The thing about exercising is that we all know we should be doing it, but a lot of us don’t bother.
Now, instead of me asking “do you exercise?”, what if I asked, “do you exercise at work?” (and I don’t mean going to your onsite gym). There is one exercise I know you will carry out, your fire drill. Once a year you will get everyone outside and record the results as part of your fire safety plan. You will have risk assessments in place to identify what you need to do to prevent fire and how to keep people safe. We all know that a fire at our place of work would be terrible and could have devastating consequences for our business. That is why we train for it and we have plans in place to help prevent it from happening and to know what to do if it does happen.
Statistically, a business is far more likely to suffer a cyber attack than a fire
But how often has a fire broken out at your place of work? I would hazard a guess not very often, and yet we plan for it and we exercise for it. In their Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2021, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport reported that four in ten businesses reported having a cyber security breach or attack in the last 12 months and the average cost to those businesses that lost data or assets was £8,460.
If there was a 40% chance something might happen to your business that could impact negatively on it, you would take action to help protect it. But so many businesses don’t exercise how they would respond to a cyber-attack. The reasons that are often given include “I don’t know where to begin”, “I can’t afford to pay for an exercise” and “I wouldn’t understand how to carry out a cyber exercise”.
Many organisations don’t realise there is a free exercising tool that you can use today that is straightforward to understand, will guide you through the entire process, and is completely free. It is called Exercise in a Box and it helps organisations find out how resilient they are to cyber-attacks and practise their response in a safe environment.
In partnership with the Scottish Business Resilience Centre (SBRC), Converged Communication Solutions is delighted to be hosting two Exercise in a Box events in April. The first of these, on 21 April, will look at how your organisation would respond to a phishing attack that leads to ransomware infecting your network. Ransomware is malicious software that locks all of your files, preventing you from accessing any of your data.
The second event, on 27 April, will focus on working from home. Many businesses had to quickly adapt to home working last year and this event will examine what cyber security risks are associated with remote working.
The events are free and will be facilitated by experts from Converged Communication Solutions and SBRC.
If you would like to attend one (or both) of our events, please register via the links below and I look forward to seeing you later in the month.
