When your company's reputation, revenue, and customer trust are at stake, it is critical that you be able to detect and respond to security incidents and events.
Whether the breach is minor or major, you must have an incident response plan in place to reduce the risks of becoming a victim of the latest cyber-attack.
Incident response strategies and plans define what constitutes a breach, the roles and responsibilities of the security team, the tools for managing a breach, the steps that must be taken to address a security incident, how the incident will be investigated and communicated, and the notification requirements in the aftermath of a data breach.
The 3 most important reasons why you need an incident response plan right now are listed below.
Safeguard Your Data
Data security is important for both personal and professional reasons. The MRB Team can help you to protect your data to avoid it falling into the wrong hands and being held for ransom.
Keeping data assets safe throughout the incident response process entails a plethora of tasks and responsibilities for the response team. Employee Awareness, secure backups, leveraging logs and security alerts to detect malicious activity, proper identity and access management, a strong focus on patch management and an effective password policy are all critical procedures.
Ensure the Protection of Your Reputation and Customer Trust
According to IDC, 78% of consumers would take their business elsewhere if they were personally impacted by a data breach. If a security breach is not addressed promptly, the business risks losing some or all of its customers. A data breach does nothing to bolster your clients' faith. In truth, it will quite likely be a PR nightmare. Not to mention, if your business is publicly traded, investor and shareholder trust can plummet significantly in the aftermath of a disclosed data breach. Consider the share prices of several of the greatest data breaches in recent years — Equifax, Target, Yahoo, and Sony, to name a few.
Safeguard Your Revenue
A comprehensive incident response plan protects your company from potential revenue loss. According to the 2017 Cost of Data Breach Study conducted by the Ponemon Institute, the average cost of a data breach is $3.6 million. Consider the Home Depot breach, which cost $62 million in total and affected over 65 million customer credit and debit card accounts. Target's data breach exposed over 100 million customer records, resulting in a 10% decline in stock price.
Any significant data breach jeopardizes revenue. While your company may not be a Home Depot or a Target, a data breach can have a significant impact on a small to mid-size business. 60% of small and medium-sized firms fail within six months of a data breach. Not only is direct corporate revenue at stake, but also the expenditures associated with litigation, remediation, forensic investigations, and regulatory and compliance fines in the aftermath of a security breach.
The quicker your company detects and responds to a data breach or even a security event, the less likely it is to have a severe impact on your data, customer confidence, reputation, and potential revenue loss.
If your firm lacks an incident response procedure, consider partnering with MRB to develop a tailored solution for your business.