Aycliffe Today Business Aycliffe Today Business issue 32 | Page 10

10 | Aycliffe Today Business Will you fail to comply? GDPR [General Data Protection Regulation] comes into effect on May 23rd, and its arrival has turned the spotlight on how companies collect, use and protect their data. Essentially an update to the Data Protection Act, ALL organisations, large and small, will be affected – are YOU prepared? The amount of data every business holds and uses varies, but even those who deal solely with other businesses and handle minimal personally identifiable information are not immune to either the upcoming regulation or the reputational damage and costly business interruption a cyber-attack can bring. As the deadline looms, businesses are becoming increasingly concerned at the cost of non-compliance, particularly as the ICO will have the power to issue fines in excess of £17m. Now is the perfect time to look at your cyber security strategy and evaluate your data management needs. At razorblue we believe that every good cyber security strategy should start with an assessment of your specific circumstances. This is the first step of the ‘IT & Information Security Circle’, a simple six-stage continual process that razorblue uses to ensure that both business and technical risks are discovered, assessed and reduced on every ‘pass’. At the most basic level, you need to look at the sensitive data you keep and critically assess it in terms of whether you need it, whether you are even entitled to keep it, and how you will process and store it. At a technical level, data encryption, secure remote access, and patch management are all key areas to explore. The Information Commissioner has already levied significant fines for breaches in all of these areas within the last few months – many of which were to SMEs. t: 0333 344 6 344 e: [email protected] w: razorblue.com Our cyber security cycle Every organisation should expect to be hit by a breach at some point. Security solutions can and will fail – and efforts should be made to minimise the impact when it does happen. Deploy multiple layers of technology to ensure threats are caught and minimise the chance of human error by implementing appropriate network segmentation. razorblue has been helping organisations from different industries across the North East to meet business IT challenges since 2006 and is well-placed to offer practical advice. We own and operate our own network and cloud environment which allows us to be 100% accountable, plus we hold ISO27001 Information Security Management and Cyber Essentials accreditations. Contact us to find out how we can work with your business to provide working technology solutions, whatever your IT challenge may be.