A guide to winning trust and getting the most out of your security program.

Are you missing out on opportunities because you’ve been unable to demonstrate effective security to key stakeholders such as your customers? Or, are you hesitant to adopt new technologies such as the cloud in light of security threats? This guide (and the associated series) is intended to help you align your security program with your business needs.

While cyber security breaches dominate the headlines, the vast majority of our customers are seeking to improve their cyber security posture in order to launch new products or services (often leveraging new technologies such as cloud or artificial intelligence), build trust and win new business.

In order to execute on the business driver to “make more sales” businesses need to develop a higher degree of trust (which is achieved through better security). This is especially true as we generate more data and become more dependent on computer systems for helping with many aspects of our lives.

Developing trust is not easy and comes from a history of delivering on the protection of data and systems, by minimising security incidents and responding effectively when things do go wrong (by learning from what went wrong and improving rather than trying to pretend a negative event didn’t happen or worse won’t happen).

In this series of articles, we’ll explore the key steps in establishing an effective security program:

1. Knowing your assets and avoiding a one size fits all approach to security
2. Managing your cyber security risks now and into the future
3. Building role-based security policies and standards that live and breathe
4. Measuring and improving conformance with security policies and standards

These key steps will help you improve your security program and operate a system that continues to evolve as you do. Business of all shapes and sizes can follow the same approach, although may tailor the depth and breadth of their considerations depending on their needs.

External factors such as legislation and regulation, for example, the Australian Privacy Act (link below) and European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (link below), do provide a base level of motivation to implement an information security program.

However, go beyond a compliance focused security program. Connect your security program with your business needs including opportunities, threats and risks. Most regulations and standards including the industry standard ISO 27001 (link below) require that you follow exactly this approach.

If you’re running an effective security program, you can show evidence of this to your key stakeholders such as customers and build trust. You can also seek third-party assessment and/or certification (e.g. ISO 27001) to independently validate your security posture and further increase trust.

We at Arcord Cyber Security (link below) provide security consulting services to assist organisations develop effective cyber security programs. We’ve also developed our TrustyGate software (link below) to make this process as simple as possible for small to medium sized organisations including start-ups.

We plan to develop the TrustyGate cyber security management platform much further. If you have any questions or feedback, or would like a trial account, please don’t hesitate to visit the website or get in touch by emailing us.

For more information:

• TrustyGate cyber security management platform
• Arcord Cyber Security consulting services
• ISO 27001
• Privacy Act (Australia)
• European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)