Hello, and welcome back to this next TomCast from GuardSight; we are a tactical cybersecurity-as-a-service organization dedicated to helping businesses protect their data, their assets, and their endpoints.

Today we are going to talk a little about one of those not-necessarily-discussed topics from the cybersecurity industry. Now, this could fit any industry, actually, but since we are in the business of cybersecurity, that is the one we’ll be focusing on. That topic is industry adaptability and resilience.

Why a weird seemingly non-focused topic such as this? Well, most of you out there listening are in the world of technology that is ever changing and ever evolving. Many of you have already exhibited some of that adaptability; I don’t see many out there still using typewriters or palm pilots (at least, I haven’t seen any recently). As careers have progressed, so have the technological needs of organizations.

Imagine yourself in business in the late 80’s or early 90’s (or even before if that suits you). These were days of inter-office memos (big manilla envelopes that were passed from office to office, person to person), large ledgers for bookkeeping, and the list goes on. What does that look like now? Email, applications like QuickBooks, etc. Did the folks using interoffice memo’s suddenly die off like the dodo when email came out? Hardly.

People adapted. Changes in industry are like any changes. They are the only true constant. You can guarantee that change will occur at some point. Where? Not sure. When? Also, not sure. But your ability to adapt to the changes is key. Learning new applications, learning new processes, learning new approaches, all of these are necessary if one wishes to continue to progress in their field.

Cybersecurity is no different. The cybersecurity landscape looks much, much different than it used to 20 years ago, even 10 years ago. As organizations continued to come online to do business the cybersecurity field not only became a lot more relevant, but it also became a necessity. Physical crimes still take place, but logical crimes are commonplace now. Adaptability within the cybersecurity industry is not only important, but also required if you wish to have any type of success.

We’ve discussed the adaptability part of this topic, but what about the resiliency portion? Well, resiliency is equally as important, and adaptability is required for resiliency to exist. At an organizational level, in order for a business to be truly resilient, they must have the skill or ability to adapt to adverse events and disruptions while being able to maintain operations while keeping their people and resources safe.

Looks like that adaptability is rather important there, doesn’t it? How does an organization become resilient if an adverse event has never occurred? The answer there is preparation. Granted, there are only so many scenarios you can truly prepare for. Some are simply unknown. Having a business continuity plan or at least a disaster recovery plan in place is a major step in that preparation.

Go back in your mind to the days of elementary school. Think of the periodic fire drills where teachers would line everyone up to prevent panic, then orderly walk everyone outside to the place where accountability personnel were located. This was an exercise to prepare for an adverse event. Has your organization conducted any such training so that if a natural disaster occurred, your employees would know what to do and where to go? What about a not-so-natural disaster? We commonly think of fires, earthquakes, meteors, hurricanes, and the like, but what about insider threats, social engineering, and other threats?

The key takeaway here is that change happens. Your and your organization’s resilience depends on the ability to adapt to those changes. Are all the changes going to be a positive? Absolutely not. Preparation is the best way you can attempt to plan for both the good and the bad types of change. GuardSight, for example, has a comprehensive business continuity plan in place and has tested that plan multiple times to ensure the employees know precisely what to do and where to go if adversity strikes.

We here at GuardSight thank you for taking the time to listen to this TomCast. For more information on various cybersecurity tips head on over to our website and check out more TomCasts. Those are located over on www.guardsight.com/tomcast. Or, if you would like more information on what GuardSight can do for you, head on over to www.guardsight.com and contact us. There are several free cybersecurity tools out there that can help you improve your overall security posture. We’d love to hear from you! Thanks!