By Martin Quinn (Principal Consultant) 4 October 2014
Rebuilding trust is an expensive exercise that most businesses should avoid at all costs. Trust is something that is often earned over time, and once lost, is difficult to recover. In business this also rings true, businesses forge trust over time, whether it be business to business (B2B) or business to consumer (B2C), trust is earned by consumer confidence, brand reputation and delivering good products or services.
If your product or service becomes sloppy, disconnected or quality becomes inferior, a business can quickly address this by; increasing quality, tightening up delivery, and reconnecting with customers. But, when consumer confidence or brand reputation are damaged, this is a long road to recovery.
This type of damage can occur in many forms, for example;
- a privacy breach
- being hacked,
- loss or exposure of data, or
- just lackadaisical business processes.
A privacy breach, not only causes damage to the business, but with the enforcement of the new Australian Privacy Principles (for businesses of $3M revenue), this could also incur a hefty fine ($1.3M). An organisation that has been hacked could not only have a privacy breach, but could also have had intellectual property stolen (lost data), which could jeopardise market and competitive edge. Poor business processes can cause damage by leaving an organisation open to litigation (internal and external), careless business processes can also directly affect the bottom line profit and loss.
Organisations can protect themselves through a multifaceted security and risk based approach. A risk based approach takes into account those items which are considered important or sensitive, and reviews the threats to these items, what the likelihood of the threat is and finally if the threat occurs, what is the impact on the business, if the final result is high impact, then this item requires security and protection.
A risk assessment helps a business identify the threats, likelihood and the impact and provides the business focal areas to apply security and protection. Those areas where the threats are unknown, businesses should look to test the current security and protection. This way the business understands what is coined the “threat landscape”. If adequate protections are in place, great, the threat is understood. However, if protections are lacking, the business can look at reinforcing or replacing the current protections and the threat and risk is understood.
Doing the above can help assist in rebuilding trust once it has been damaged, and it will definitely help to solidify trust moving forward. But once trust has been damaged there will always be some residual damage.
Intact Security has extensive technical knowledge and experience in assisting businesses address, overcome and improve their security posture and strengthen trust. With the capability to perform risk assessments, privacy impact assessments, vulnerability assessments, penetration testing (ethical hacking), security awareness and policy development, you can relax, your security is Intact.
So be proactive, don’t become a statistic, security is impossible to retrospective implement, contact us today for an obligation free consultation.
Intact Security offers a 1-hour free consultation. Please contact Intact Security today to book your consultationon on (02) 8070 0083.
Relax. Your security is Intact.
Author: Intact Security
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