Digital resilience for Canadian private companies

Identify your cyber risks and priorities

A private company is unlikely to have the resources to fully mitigate against every potential threat. This is why the first step is to understand what’s most important to you to protect and identify where that information is within the business. You can then identify the specific risks related to that information and the various dependencies involved and prioritize your cybersecurity controls and investments accordingly.

This step is key to developing a coordinated and tested plan to mitigate your top risks as well as effectively respond to and recover from an incident. As you go through this exercise, it’s useful to incorporate metrics that measure compliance risks, cyber maturity and privacy capabilities and help you track the progress of your cybersecurity program.

As part of this assessment, it’s important to consider the full range of threats, including those related to third parties and from insiders like employees who may—whether intentionally or not—create vulnerabilities. And for organizations moving to the cloud, remember that when migrating applications or infrastructure, you may need to reconfigure the standard security settings as they won’t necessarily give you the level of protection you need.

Simplify your cyber portfolio

For Canadian private companies that have yet to build a cybersecurity portfolio, now is the time to change that. For those that already have a cybersecurity portfolio, a key step to making the most of investments in new tools is to look at opportunities to simplify your existing set of solutions. While new tools to prevent, detect and respond to attacks can be very powerful, more isn’t necessarily better when building or assessing a cybersecurity portfolio.

Some companies, in fact, have doubled the number of cybersecurity tools they use, which can create its own set of challenges. Too many tools and vendors can add complexity, hold back risk reduction and increase costs.

By rationalizing your cybersecurity stack, you’ll end up with fewer applications that are easier and less expensive to manage. You’ll also gain better visibility into and control of your cybersecurity tools, reduce redundancies and complexity and increase integration while streamlining and improving threat monitoring. For private companies, one possibility is to look at a suite of integrated cybersecurity solutions offered by some of the large technology players that can provide the right level of protection needed by small- and medium-sized businesses.

 Amplify your cyber capabilities

While having an effective and manageable set of tools is key, so is having the right talent to ensure proper operation of your cybersecurity program. But finding that talent is becoming more challenging, with estimates suggesting millions of cybersecurity roles have been going unfilled. In the meantime, the need for key talent continues to grow as organizations look to increase situational awareness through continuous monitoring, threat detection and response.

Talent pressures are particularly challenging for small- and medium-sized companies given that they’d need several employees to ensure 24-hour daily coverage. For many private companies, this wouldn’t be cost-effective, which is why many are turning to trusted partners to help run their cybersecurity operations. This not only helps manage their cybersecurity budgets but also gives companies access to key skills and insights into emerging threats while ensuring better and lasting outcomes from their investments.