According to the National Cyber Security Centre (part of GCHQ) if you’re a small or medium-sized enterprise (SME) then there’s around a 1 in 2 chance that you’ll experience a cyber-security breach. Here are four steps to begin building a cybersecurity strategy that keeps hackers out of your business. A. Define your company's current cybersecurity status.
In 2014 the UK government's Department for Business, Innovation and Skills released a government-endorsed scheme called Cyber Essentials, to help businesses adopt good practices in information security, ensuring the protection of data, and for companies to understand how that data can be used, secured, or compromised. At a basic level the scheme ensures that data is protected from common cyber threats online.
What is it? The Cyber Essentials scheme is the UK cyber security standard developed by NCSC (National Cyber Security Centre - a subsidiary of GCHQ), which organisations can be assessed and certified against. It identifies the security controls that an organisation must have in place within their IT systems in order to have confidence that they are addressing cyber security effectively and mitigating the risk from Internet-based threats.