Working within the cyber industry or providing services into it, we believe comes with a responsibility to build the sector to have a focus on quality and raising standards, both in your own organisation and those of your customers.

As cyber threats become more sophisticated and businesses face the greatest risks they ever have from many angles, it’s important as service providers working to protect organisations that internal teams are developed to become cyber security advocates.  In turn this impacts on partners’ and customers’ employees, the ripple effect hopefully being at the very least raising curiosity.

Just because your business operates within the industry it should not be assumed that everyone in the organisation is an active advocate.  Being able to do this requires knowledge, support and confidence.  So, starting in house and building the levels of knowledge and competency within your own business across all departments is not only going to bring benefit to your business, it will transfer in to clients and the work they do, if done right.

Developing your staff in to cyber security advocates who can maintain and grow your own culture has the potential to have a direct impact on the work they do and the clients they serve.  This does not have to take on a complex and technical approach.  Keeping things simple in the beginning is going to reap great rewards as the most predominant cyber risks are those which everyone can impact without technical knowledge such as phishing emails and device security.  Developing employees in this way requires the approach to be persistent and relevant as like many things in life and work, if it becomes onerous on employees, they are at risk of switching off.

As a supplier of cyber or security related services it’s important to ensure your teams feel comfortable both talking to customers about how to increase levels of vigilance and therefore protection, but also to be able to speak up internally if they feel a customer or customer employee is creating risk.  Joint responsibility is a key part of building secure and resilient businesses. 

Our work as a recognised cyber security cluster means that we are well positioned to bring businesses and organisations together to explore ways in which we can achieve this level of collaboration. Three of the approaches that we think cyber businesses can take that we hope to explore with our members in the coming months are to:

1.       Showcase to clients what you see with other businesses, make it relevant and real to those who think that maybe they aren’t at risk from cyber crime

2.       Offer customers the opportunity to engage with different people in your company to get varying views and talk openly about their security concerns

3.       Build advocacy in to being a part of your service, the impact hopefully being that customers feel more wedded to you through authority and trust

If you are keen to be a part of building the strength of the cyber sector and overall cyber resilience in businesses across the East then do get in touch with us.