The Importance of Cybersecurity to Private Equity and M&A Firms: Part Two
In a previous post, we shared an Accenture study that cited the cyber risks faced by private equity (PE) and mergers and acquisitions (M&A) firms.
Cybersecurity Program Development
Cybersecurity best practices are a standard of doing business today, and quality matters.
Adopting a formalized cybersecurity program shows your business partners, clients, and regulators that you are prepared and ready for whatever may come your way. Done right, it can also help you identify the most impactful way to prioritize your time, energy, and budget to ensure your most critical assets are secured.
Common Challenges
Risks Are Not Understood
Many businesses fail at properly identifying risk, resulting in fear-based decisions, mis-prioritized efforts, and unrealized risks that could lead to a compromise.
Best Practices Are Missing
When cybersecurity practices are missing or not based on industry standards, vulnerabilities that should be easily mitigated can instead be easily exploited. These deficiencies also make it harder for you to demonstrate your Due Diligence & Due Care and puts you at risk of being out of compliance or being fined.
Being Unprepared for Incidents
Trying to figure out how to deal with an attack when it is happening can result in costly mistakes, lost time, and misspent efforts. Without a plan, the cost of a breach and the impact to the business are significantly increased. Failure to respond appropriately and in a timely manner could also expose you to additional fines.
How Can Rhodian Help You Formalize Your Approach to Cybersecurity?
Risks Are Not Understood
A Cybersecurity Risk Assessment is a systematic and thorough process that is designed to help you understand the key factors that attribute to the likelihood and impact behind each area of risk in your environment. Paired with additional services to help uncover technical risks, like vulnerability scans or penetration tests, you’ll have the information you need to make educated decisions about how to maximize your time, energy, and budget.
Demonstrate Your Due Diligence and Due Care
It’s no longer enough to just ‘say’ what you’re doing, you need to ‘show’ it. With the help of experienced consultants, develop Policies and Procedures appropriate for your business that will help you implement layers of security. Demonstrate and confidently report that your business is meeting data security requirements.
Be Ready for Cybersecurity Incidents
By having a well thought out Incident Response Plan, you can have confidence during the most chaotic of situations you may encounter. A proper plan will outline the steps to take from the moment a breach is suspected to the post incident reporting. Know exactly what you are required to do by law and some of the best practices that will help you more quickly identify and contain incidents that could blow up into costly events.
Implementing the Key Elements of Your Cybersecurity Program
Whether you need a fully formed Cybersecurity Program or help with just one of the key components, Rigid Bits can provide the right solution for your requirements, experience, and budget.
- A Cybersecurity Risk Assessment is an exercise designed to assess risks systematically and thoroughly within an environment, which allows enough detail and understanding to prioritize the likelihood and impact of each risk. Without truly understanding the key aspects of each risk or having a process to uncover as many unrealized risks as possible, businesses may mis-prioritize their remediation efforts or overlook important areas of risk. This results in incorrect allocation of budget and could lead to a serious cyber-attack.
- Rhodian will perform a Risk Assessment to determine key areas of risk as they pertain to IT systems. The process will collect data about systems on the network as well as third party hosted systems and applications using a workbook and consulting sessions with our experts. These items will be reviewed to determine current control protections, potential vulnerabilities, potential threats, and will include an assessment of their criticality to the success of the business.
- Businesses must document their approach to cybersecurity with written Policies & Procedures in order to demonstrate their Due Diligence and Due Care. By not taking this step, the ability to understand and follow company governance is at risk and gaps are more likely to exist.
- Rhodian will help guide the continual development of a cybersecurity program over time. Using the CIS Controls (or another mutually agreed upon cybersecurity framework) as a baseline, Rhodian will provide support through the development and review of your policies and procedures.
- We utilize an online portal to support the work of developing, tracking, and organizing the documentation and necessary evidence to show the implementation of each policy. When data security requirements must be met, the portal will provide a centralized location to simplify your compliance efforts and reporting to demonstrate that you are meeting requirements.
- Your incident response (IR) plan is the go-to document to help your business recover from a cybersecurity event and is often required to meet Breach Notification Laws that exist in all 50 states, among other regulations that could exist.
- Development of the plan takes experience and knowledge of how to prepare and respond efficiently. This process is best approached from a proactive standpoint and can save considerable time and money when the worst-case scenario becomes a reality.
- With our service, we’ll provide your business with an IR plan outline and guide your incident commander through the completion of policies that will define how your company identifies, isolates, and recovers from an incident. Additionally, we’ll help you understand the sections that are most critical to your unique needs and ensure the plan is well documented and ready to leverage when needed.
Cybersecurity Risk Consultation
Everyone has unique needs, requirements, and goals for their Cybersecurity Program. The best way to make sure you understand your options and the path ahead is to speak with our team through our free cybersecurity risk consultation to get recommendations on how to begin working toward your goals.
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