The ALS Group Risk Management Articles

Imagine a hacker infiltrated your website; the names, contact information, credit cards and social security information of every customer (and/or employee) are now being sold on the cyber-crime black market. Your website is no longer accessible, your overall reputation is tarnished and your company may possibly never recover.  This has been the reality for many businesses. The “risk mitigation” steps to avoid these events are where the focus really needs to be placed. Buying insurance, while nice, will not insulate the Company from all the “nasty” things that will likely occur from a data or privacy breach.

Cyber threats are a hot topic now and seem to be on news coverage everyday, but what does that mean for your business? These cyber threats may not seem serious (for YOUR company) until they directly affect your business, and if they do, you will realize very quickly how much damage these attacks can cause. If your business uses computers or the internet in any capacity you’re vulnerable to cyber attacks. While the use of technology in the work place continues to rise along with productivity, so does the number of access points for hackers.

Earlier this year I wrote about the movement toward companies adopting a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy. Many times this is driven by the effort to reduce costs to the company. There are, however, many pitfalls to this strategy if the framework supporting the BYOD policy is not well thought out. The February edition of RIMS magazine captures these risks and issues quite effectively. While smart phones are the obvious subject of this, we can’t forget the myriad of other communication devices (tablets) that these risks can apply to.

Employers today are constantly being faced with choices and the challenges those choices play. One of the more recent challenges is whether to allow employees to use their own smart phones to support the corporate email and functionality. On the surface, this seems like a great idea for employers as it will lower operating costs. Not so fast…According to a PWC survey “less than half of the 9300 C-suite executives surveyed have a security strategy to address personal devices in the workplace, despite the fact that 88% of employees use a mobile device for personal and work purposes”