The Expert Podcast

is cyber insurance and cyber protection being overlooked by business. as well according to a couple surveys it is. this comes from property casualty three sixty which is an industry risk management trade publication and it says that small businesses are under estimating cyber threats. let's take a look what that means for you as a business or even as a consumer. and leave your comments below what you think about this subject. many small businesses are not addressing the threat they face from hackers. in fact only eight percent of businesses with fewer than fifty employees have a dedicated budget for cyber security. many of those small businesses lump security into I. T. and they have no cybersecurity budget at all. even slightly larger companies with its fifty to two hundred forty nine employees only fourteen percent have a budget. so what does that mean first is it reasonable maybe there are no risks maybe there's nothing to worry about maybe if you have a company between zero and two hundred fifty employees you don't have to worry about cyber attacks or hacking. probably not true but maybe that's what the companies are thinking not gonna happen to me. well in reality the cyber hackers you have to look at almost like a competitor. if you are a company that's in the marketplace that sells a product or service every day you probably think about who are your competitors who's doing advertising who's talking bad about you. who's salesmen are out there trying to steal your customers offer a better deal offer better service. can you relate to that mentality you take that same mentality and apply to cyber security because I can tell you this right now the cyber hackers operate like a business. they're out there with organized management sales departments bonuses payroll hierarchy even manuals of how to run your business. these cyber hacking companies are organized as much if not more than your company. they have departments that track KPIs how many hacks are they trying which ones are working what has the highest closing ratio. what has the best return on investment. who can they recruit to become a better company do business development. they're out there they have these very structured organizations that are looking to get you they're looking to hurt you. and how do they do it well they find a way into your system they lock down your data they send you a ransom demand if you pay fifty thousand will unlock your payroll unlock your accounts receivable whatever customer data you have. and if you don't pay not only will we not unlock it but we will also release it to the public to your competitors to the government whoever. how can you prevent it. well it doesn't take much you know companies who have zero in their budget for this they're missing out on a big opportunity. nobody wants to spend money in a company nobody wants to have more expense if you're a business owner you're looking to cut expenses every day. I get it if you want to reduce your budget. the side on the profitable statement you want to reduce the expense side. but allocating money for cyber security is actually not an expense. you will make money from it. if you put in two thousand dollars a month into cyber security you will get a reward for more than that coming out the other side. let me tell you what I mean most of the things that you do for cyber liability protection will actually have rewards for you in your business development. you'll make more money in your company you have more sales you'll have less expense by putting in place these policies. one of the policies could simply be backing up everything. and I mean everything not just year customer information your sales information but your apps all year app platforms all your software. and having two versions of back up not just one one you want to have on site on server that's disconnected from your internet. because if it's connected to the internet or your network you defeat the purpose of a back up. because the hackers going to get in and lock down everything inside your network. so have a separate server sitting in a corner somewhere that once a day once a week whatever frequency you want to do it you take all the data all the records off the entire system input on that system. maybe the way you do it is you connect it while you're backing up and then disconnect it. a better way to do it would be to physically use media. save everything to it magnetic data or physical data or an external hard drive and then connect that hard drive to your backup system. that's one back up the other back up is the cloud and have that be separated it from your server at all times other than when you're uploading data. so if a hacker gets into your system and locks down erases deletes encrypts your entire network you have two places where that didn't happen. one in the cloud one on a separate server. look at a NAS network appliance the server. where you can put hard drives and a device that can store terabytes of data and you want to put your files your software your platforms all on there. how's that gonna make you money well here's the thing how many times even without being hacked have you had a problem with your system you have to call I. T. guy to fix it. this will reduce that expense. in addition the process of doing this will certainly reveal things about your company your business your sales process that you can improve. by saving this data and restoring it and playing around with that you will find things in your sales system that can be made better with efficiency. and that in itself will either reduce expenses or increase sales. third way it'll give you a profit center from this is on your insurance. if you are going to buy cyber liability insurance which if you don't have it today you are going to buy it some day guaranteed. it's kind of like you wouldn't think about not having general liability insurance today you wouldn't think about not having fire insurance on your on your building you would't think about doing that there's gonna come a day in your life that you would just imagine I can't I wouldn't even think about not having cyber insurance. when that day comes the agency brokered insurer whoever's writing your policy it's going to ask you what do you do right now for cyber protection. if you say I don't know my I. T. guy does it wrong answer you're gonna pay twice as much for cyber policy. if you can say well for the last twelve months we've been doing these procedures putting things into the server separating things having meetings efficiency boom you're in. secret handshake you get a policy and it's cheap. because the cyber insurance are already starting to take big losses from companies that had no plan in place so in the future even starting today many of the cyber insurance companies will not even write a policy to a company that has no cyber protection system in place. and if they do it's gonna cost an arm and a leg. so those are ways that you can get better prices on cyber insurance and do things that will help your business even without having a claim to grow more and have less expense