Effective Cybersecurity Strategy for a Small Business [We Asked 45 Experts]

While there are some positive nuggets in here, I would not recommend the sum product to any of my small business clients. I want to be clear that I don’t say this lightly. In terms of cyber-security guidance, small businesses are severely underserved. As such, I generally welcome any contribution or effort to contribute relevant content. With that in mind, I thought I’d offer a few pointers for those who want to do so.

Keep guidance actionable and be aware that small businesses are often operating with a low degree of technical sophistication. While it may seem reasonable to point to NIST guidelines including the CSF, be aware that your audience might not even have the groundwork to examine the problem at this level of abstraction. It might seem like a tip like “do backup” satisfies my criteria, but I’d argue that it’s still not actionable for the small business who does not fully understand the lifecycle of data in their own organization.

Shine a light the threat landscape before reaching for easy fixes. In my experience, small business leaders are particularly susceptible to snake oil and silver bullets. They’re quick to deal with isolated symptoms rather than the root cause of their ailments. Before you offer a suggestion, ask yourself whether it might be misconstrued as a quick fix. A better first step is often to put the primary threat and vulnerabilities into terms that are meaningful to the business.

Don’t forget about the humans, and I mean both the leaders who may try to enact these solutions as well as employees. What will they do when they encounter friction with your guidance?

If you’ve been in the industry for awhile, it’s likely time to read up on topics like usable security and the new NIST password guidance. While there are still use cases for 60-90 day password rotation, it does not belong at the forefront of a small business password policy, where it very well may be weakening the company’s security posture.

I’d say that with an audience that has limited resources to confront the challenges, we need to consistently focus on incorporating basic security hygiene into everyday business processes. I don’t see much value in a solution like Li-Fi networking for a business that hasn’t found a way to keep servers and end-user systems patched, meaningfully improve their employees password practices, attempted to write an actionable security plan, or even taken the time to discover and document their own legal and regulatory obligations.

Lastly, since I touched on it a couple times earlier, please be aware that many (maybe most) small businesses will get lost in the process of creating any sort of formal security policy or implementation plan. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read a security policy that had no grounding in reality. I do encounter quite a few guides that were downloaded as free resources or handed off by a well-meaning MSP. Sometimes a business owner has succeeded in filling in the blank spaces meant for their business name, but they’re more likely to have left it blank or filled out with wrong information.