Why You Need to Review Cybersecurity at Executive Meetings

When holding meetings with executive management or your board of directors, time is often limited. There are many things to discuss, and it can be a challenge to determine what makes it onto the agenda. For most companies, the topic of cybersecurity rarely gets discussed at these high-level meetings. The CEO, COO, CFO, and others on the leadership team likely assume that they won’t have the in-depth knowledge of the subject to provide value, and leave it to the CTO to handle.

While it’s true that cybersecurity can be a very complex subject, the same can be said of sales, marketing, operations, and any other areas of business. When done properly, the CTO or someone from their data security management team should be able to share key information at executive meetings in a way that everyone can understand so that they can provide their feedback. There are several important reasons why an effort should be made to ensure cybersecurity is regularly reviewed at executive meetings.

Problems Can Be Catastrophic

One of the most important reasons that you should be talking about cybersecurity at these meetings is because problems in this area can be so disastrous. For many companies, a cybersecurity problem would have more of a negative impact on the organization than a major problem in any other department. Studies have shown that when a company experiences a significant data breach, they end up going out of business within a year over half the time. This is a frightening fact that should help to illustrate just how critical it is to discuss the topic regularly.

Cybersecurity Impacts the Entire Business

While it’s obvious that a cybersecurity breach would impact the entire company in a variety of ways, the same can be said of just the day-to-day actions taken by the data security management staff. Many IT professionals will look at cybersecurity only from the perspective of keeping the company safe from any type of digital attack. That’s obviously the most important thing they do, but they also need to make sure that they are thinking about how their actions will impact the rest of the business.

For example, if the IT team implemented a new requirement that all passwords throughout the organization require 10 characters including numbers, capital letters, lowercase letters, symbols, and cannot contain any words, it would improve security. It would also, however, cause a significant decrease in overall productivity for the company. People would often forget their password, get locked out of their account, or run into other issues. For this reason, discussing what types of actions the IT team wants to take to improve security with the executive team will help to ensure that the right balance between security and user experience is found.

All Departments Need to Play a Role

No matter how good your technical team is, they cannot fully protect the company from cybersecurity threats on their own. A large percentage of data breaches happen because someone within the company was careless with their password or other information that allowed a hacker to gain access to sensitive systems. Having someone from the IT team reminding the executive management team of the important role that every individual in every department plays can help to minimize these risks.

Providing Important Oversight

Every department can benefit from having people from outside of their direct area providing oversight and making sure that everything is being handled correctly. Supplying the CEO, COO, CFO, and other leaders in the company with regular updates on cybersecurity will help with this goal. The executive team can also bring in an outside business IT services professional to perform audits and provide an objective opinion on how things are being done if needed.

Add Cybersecurity to your Regular Executive Meeting Agenda Today

If it’s been a while since you have heard anything about cybersecurity at your company’s high-level meetings, now is the time to change it. Keeping this as a topic of conversation within the leadership team will help to ensure your business is as well-protected as possible from one of the biggest threats out there today. Engaging with a managed IT services company like GSDSolutions that offers data security services is a way to accomplish this in an efficient and affordable manner.

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