Worcester Business Journal

18 Worcester Business Journal | August 5, 2019 | wbjournal.com By Michelle Drolet Michelle Drolet is CEO of Framingham data security provider Towerwall. She is listed among the Top 25 Women in Cybersecurity by Cyber Defense maga- zine. You may reach her at michelled@towerwall.com. 10) Employees are the weakest link. To err is human. Ponemon claims 34% of data breaches involving employees cost an average of $9 million – more than twice the global average of all breaches. 9) Get buy-in from the top. The C-suite must com- mit to cyber security via stated policies spelling out consequences for non-compliance (i.e., hefty fines, lost productivity, business interruption). Buy-in ensures increased support from multiple groups. 8) Build benchmarks. Start by establishing a baseline to know what employees know before & after your security awareness training. Use phishing or ransomware simulators to test failure points and readiness. Study participant rates and class feedback to assess if training needs updating. 7) Evaluate your threat exposure. Document your most critical assets. Send out company-wide cybersecurity questionnaires; use the results to roll out a larger program to be used to target vulnerable employees identified in the assessment. 6) Use data to measure effectiveness. Before launching your program, tally the number of securi- ty incidents affecting your business; count incidents reported by employees, then assess quarterly afterwards. 5) Conduct awareness training. Cyber security awareness is the essential counterstrike against bad actors and key to avoiding data breaches. Training all employees is the best front-line defense, followed by technology support. Smaller, break-out meetings work best. 4) Train employees to hook a phish. Bogus emails (or texts) with malware payloads (attach- ments & links) is most common attack vector. Test and train employees to identify various social engineering techniques. 3) Get creative with content. Engage employ- ees with video and images evoking emotions to motivate them into action. Fine tune your training content based on different audiences; standard off-the-shelf training may not fit all. 2) Know your regulations. Federal and state com- pliance mandates can help establish best practices and processes required by regulators. Knowing your program is compliant can help strengthen your cyber security defenses. 1) Make training a continuous process. Set up a consistent cadence of ongoing training programs to cover most security threats. Begin at time of on-boarding new employees, share published news stories of major data breaches to keep security issues top of mind. Recruit managers to send out alerts to emphasize this cultural shift towards awareness. K N O W H O W Match your marketing to your resources 10 1: C H A N G I N G T I T L E S BY SUSAN SHALHOUB Special to the Worcester Business Journal J ob titles out there now didn't exist a decade ago: chief talent officer, for example. Many employees welcome broader titles, seeing professional-de- velopment benefits to their resumes. But why do companies change employ- ee job titles, and what potential value does it offer to them? They engage millennials. You've seen job titles like rockstar and ninja out there. Titles more exciting than just associate can make a new, younger employee feel valued and help struc- ture how they feel about their role in an organization, writes Rachel Prem- ack at BusinessInsider.com. "ese sort of zesty job titles are nothing new, particularly in the tech world," she writes. "But the practice seems to have trickled down to, for example, OneA- merica, a financial-services firm based in Indianapolis, which just changed its humdrum role of data analyst to data wrangler." They broaden employees' scope of collaboration. New, more-encom- passing job titles can open lines of communication across departments, a good thing for any company. "Job titles aren't the only reason that people don't get together, but titles do limit interac- tions in ways that deserve attention," writes Inc.com's Steve Farber. Other- wise, why would a sales manager think about improvements to a company's sales strategy, for example? They show action around crisis. Christine Hayward is executive direc- tor of IIC Partners, an Oregon-based executive search company. She told Forbes companies do and can use new titles as a way to address corpo- rate concerns. "In the wake of serious workplace accusations and a shakeup of its senior leadership, CBS now has a chief people officer and a chief busi- ness ethics and compliance officer," she writes. "Airbnb appointed its first chief trust officer to focus on the online and offline safety of its billions of world- wide customers." 1 0 T H I NG S I know about . . . ... Cyber security awareness BY JULIA BECKER COLLINS Special to the Worcester Business Journal W W I was doing an online live workshop recently, and in advance of it, I ran a poll to see what additional topics people wanted me to cover during the Q&A sections. e winner? By a landslide: What kind of marketing is the best use of my resources? Every decision in business is about using your limited resources to gain the best results, and it's a concern every company faces; but one impacting small- er and medium businesses the most. Let's break down what decisions you need to make in your marketing to best use your limited resources. Understanding your resources First, it's important to know what's on the line. Your resources are finite, and they are different from everyone else's – even your competitors. It's important not to fixate on any single one and under- stand the resources you take for granted might be your most valuable ones. Money: The first on everyone's mind Money – profits, gross income, overhead, budgets, etc. – are the first and foremost for many businesses, especially when the owner handles the financials. How much you can budget to marketing – from running ads to outsourcing work – contributes to the scale and scope but may not be your biggest resource risk. Time: The most valuable resource However, owners overlook the time investment marketing can be. Most marketing fails not because of misman- agement or bad planning, but because companies don't have the time to sustain it. If your marketing goals and plans are larger than the time you and your staff can devote to it, it will be DOA. Expertise: Changes how to handle marketing Lastly, a big modifier to your market- ing will be the experience and exper- tise of your marketing department. If you want to write blogs, do you have someone with the experience to write engaging and SEO-friendly content and understand your products? Is the owner willing to associate their face with their brand? What sets you apart from your competition that you can capitalize on? Answering marketing questions Next, it's important to answer some questions about your marketing goals. Stepping away and being able to look at hard questions and answers can give you a better idea on what your true goals are. • What are your business goals? • What is your marketing trying to achieve? • Who does your company serve? • Where do they make their buying decisions? Branding: Keep your eyes on the prize Besides inaction, the other major waste of resources is due to chasing trends. Have friends telling you that Instagram is where it's at? at doesn't mean your business can thrive or even survive there. It's important to focus on your business goals and find the marketing solutions tailored to meet that goal you can support with your limited time, budget, and exper- tise. Don't chase things for the sake of being new, but only if they align with your needs and abilities. e resources, needs, and mar- keting of every business are differ- ent. What's important is you lay the groundwork by assessing your resources and marketing environment to know where your efforts are best spent. Start with these ideas, weight your resources, and plan out your marketing by answering the right questions. Julia Becker Collins is the chief operating officer at Westborough digital marketing agency Vision Advertising. She can be reached at julia@vision-advertising.com. W

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