Security vs. Compliance

Ask yourself the following questions:

• If you have proper IT security, are you compliant within your industry?
• Is IT security just a tool stack or a process and procedure for your employees to follow?
• If you signed off on insurance to secure your compliant, are you 110% confident your IT department aligns with the insurance requirements?
• Can you regurgitate the insurance requirements?

If you hesitated on answering any of those questions, this blog will help.

In this blog, you’ll understand the difference between IT security vs. being compliant in your evolving business. You’ll also learn how to tighten up any loose tech end so your insurance coverage will save your business rather than harm your employees, or worse, your customers.
IT Security

What is IT security? Simply defined, it is the practice of implementing effective technical controls to protect company assets. This means hackers will experience many dead ends before potentially accessing your business assets. Remember, it’s not about IF it will happen, it’s about when and how bad.

So, you’re probably thinking,

“Well, if being hacked is potentially unavoidable, then why should I even bother to implement IT security when I haven’t even been hacked yet without IT security?”

Easy! If getting sick is unavoidable, then why do people go to the doctor for a check-up? Why do people get vaccines? Why do people eat an apple a day?

More and more people are learning how to become a hacker and becoming quite successful. With hacking communities flourishing, this is leaving small to medium-sized businesses to become a playground for hackers to fine-tune their skills before launching their debut attack on larger corporations.

There are different categories of IT security such as architecture and infrastructure management, cybersecurity, testing, and information security. Falling under each of those categories are four additional properties that directly impacts business owners and their employees: Hardware, software, insurance, and human behavior. Let’s go into more detail of these four properties after reviewing the compliancy section.

Now you understand, IT security is more than just a tool stack for employers to check off their list. It’s dedication to their business’s future, employee’s security, and customer’s trust- but what about the industry’s trust?

Compliancy

What is compliancy in regard to security? Compliance, simply put, is meeting the requirements of a third party to allow your business to align with a particular market, laws, or customer. Compliancy puts a focus on monitoring risk, not just the attacks that are happening to you, but the future ones that could impact you. Checking that compliancy box can revolve around industry regulations, government policies, security frameworks, and client/customer contractual terms.

If your business does not meet the terms of compliancy, it can have a sizable effect on the security of your company. These effects can range from losing the trust of a customer which damages your reputation, to facing legal and/or financial consequences which will cause your business to have to pay fees or blacklist it from working in certain market or demographic.

The Four Properties of Risk Management

Here’s a quick break down of what we have review so far:

• Security is the practice of implementing things to protect your company and its assets.
• Compliance is taking those practices and actually applying them to meet the third-party requirement.
• Security is driven by the need to protect your organization against a constant stream of threats.
• Compliance is to fulfil external requirements and driven by business means.

Remember those four properties previously mentioned? Here’s how each of them should be applied for a successful IT environment that insurers will love you for.

• Software:
  
  • Software security is the idea of implementing things that enable your software to continue to function correctly under an attack, or anything else a hacker may throw at you. Security for your software is attained by integrity, authentication, and availability. Compromising in any one of these areas leaves your software insecure.

• • To ensure security you simply apply techniques that assess, mitigate, protect the vulnerabilities. Some ways to do this is to use code review to find bugs, vulnerabilities and weaknesses. You can also run risk-based security testing, penetration testing, and architectural risk analysis to find gaps in your security.

• Hardware:
  
  • Hardware often slips through the cracks because businesses focus so much on their software security. While having secured software to protect devices is vital, you should ensure your business has up-to-date hardware to perform the modern-day activities. Think about it, you wouldn’t put go-cart tires on a Ferrari, right? This applies the same way for tech. Keeping Windows 7 on a Microsoft Surface is only begging for hackers to take your information (even when anti-virus is built in).

• • Try this! Review the lifespan of your top 5-10 most used devices. If they were purchased within the last 5 years, they’re good! If any device is over the 5 year mark, it’s time to review your technical roadmap and understand which device should be upgraded.

• • Implementing new hardware every 5 years will help protect your business, help your employees get more done and prevent downtime, which in return will impress your customers.

• • Not sure where to start with upgrading your hardware? Team CTS offers Hardware as a Service for our customers to get ahead and stay ahead in all of their technical needs. Click here to learn more!

• Human Behavior:
  
  • One thing that cannot be controlled by a computer or regulated by software is a Karen clicking on a phishing email stating that she has 72 hours to lock in her information for a potentially new interest rate on her house. We’ll call this the “well-meaning but misdirected employee”.

• • Even if your company has the best IT security and updated hardware, the mistakes of human behavior are inevitable, therefore Team CTS implements employee training for our customers. Between fake phishing simulations to onsite training, we make it our mission to provide tech confidence to your front-line workers so they will help keep information secured.

• • Here’s an example; Let’s say your employee decides to pick up some coffee before a meeting with a customer. They quickly realized they forgot to send a quote to another customer. So, for 5 minutes the employee bypasses the VPN and jumps on the coffee shop’s free wifi… that states: “FREE WiFi Coffee Shop”. The email is sent and the employee is off to meet the customer.

• • Seems innocent, right? Here’s what really happened: The wifi network named “FREE WiFi Coffee Shop” was a hacker’s hotspot disguised as a real network. While the employee mocked up the last minute quote and sent it to his customer, a hacker sitting in the coffee shop managed to not only duplicate and steal every contact the employee had on file, but the same thing applied to confidential files about your company. Now, your business is getting hit with phishing emails, in which Karen has fallen for and 6 months later, none of your employees have access to their accounts until the business pays out 6 million dollars in ransom.

• • Within 6 months and 5 minutes, your business has experienced a ransomware attack. The only thing that can potentially save you is your insurance and compliancy. However, if you’re not compliant, you may not be insured.

• Insurance:
  
  • If you and your team do not comply to the technical requirements, the insurance company is not liable to protect you to the best of their ability. This means that even if you have insurance, your team is not abiding by specific requirements such as two-factor authentication, leaving your information vulnerable to security breaches, computer malfunctions, and losing data with limited ability to have it recovered. Without compliance, a simple security breach could be very costly to your business in the form of fines, penalties, and even paying out of pocket for ransom. Don’t even get us started with your new reputation around town when all of this unfolds…

Now what?

Security and compliance are nothing but beneficial for your business. Do they give you a headache? Of course. Are they crucial to the success of modern-day businesses? Most definitely. As cyber-attacks develop and evolve, your IT will need to keep you ahead of the enemies. The key in getting ahead and staying ahead is finding a team that works best for you and your environment.

Team CTS can not only provide modern-day technology and security but we have also teamed up with Mid-State Insurance to provide compliancy that aligns within your industry. In fact, we have an in-person seminar on January 12^th, 2022 that can provide any answers to question revolving around IT Security and Compliancy within this new business era. To learn more about the seminar, click here.