Back in March of 2013 I wrote a blog post about IT security and budgets. You can check it out here: Maximize IT Security Regardless of Budgets | Lead I.T. Consulting (leaditconsulting.net). That post used a CIO report as a reference to support the details. Here we are in 2024 and a new CFO study provides more insight on how much has remained the same.
In this study, “Grant Thornton survey: Despite cost and hiring challenges, CFOs reach highest level of optimism in nearly three years”, CFOs had two major points to consider: (1) “expense increases for the next 12 months are IT/digital transformation (64%) and (2) cyber risk/security (62%). In the history of the survey, these two percentages have never been higher.”
In the face of this, I was happy to see an acknowledgment of a major change that many business owners have yet to embrace. “Cybersecurity is an area that every company has to continually address,” said Mike Notarangelo, partner and private equity audit & assurance leader at Grant Thornton LLP and a principal at Grant Thornton Advisors LLC. “There’s a sharpened focus on it in the public markets given the recent SEC cybersecurity rules and some notable breaches in the past few years.” Given that these are larger companies, and, at Lead IT Consulting our focus is more on small to medium businesses (those with 5 to 50 employees) I sense a need to share how we translate this into actions for our customers.
When it comes to our customers, there is a much larger need to understand team members and their relationship with and use of technology every day. As a small business, we know that there is very little excess capacity or slack that can take the challenge of technology changes. That is why we plan in advance and invest in understanding how to interweave improvements in technology into current workflows. In our work, the employees become subject matter experts as they are doing the work every day. Only by building trust and a sense of camaraderie is success possible.
One example we are currently working on is improving security. It is a given that our customers are using multi-factor authentication with an app as a baseline. We have embarked upon a plan to help staff who are involved with accounting and management to embrace using a password manager and hardware-based authentication to alleviate the concerns and anxiety they feel due to constant news of breaches and loss of funds. Implementation is driven by the availability of staff and follows an internal campaign on how this change will make their workspace more secure while reducing anxiety.
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