I’ve always dabbled in Board Advisory roles, even when working for major IT integrators, because consultancy at a senior level, often crosses that boundary.  The bigger companies will often value having independent advice, although I have found it’s not always welcomed by their in house IT/Cyber team, who can become quite defensive.  The more experienced of them do see the value, even if it’s only validating what they have already put forward as a solution to a particular problem.  And they often use a Board advisor to craft the boring bits, around strategy and policies.  And I’m OK with that.

When we set up H2 to service the SME sector, we naively thought that they’d welcome an advisor who could guide them through what can be a difficult minefield.  It was a bit of an eye opener that SMEs don’t see the value in this at all.  In fact, what they see is a drain on resources.  It’s a little strange because they are very happy to spend money on getting advice from their local IT company that supplies, and often manages, their IT infrastructure, but who are also focused of selling a product set, dressed up as a solution.  Now, I know that that will upset some IT providers and I’ll water my comments down a little by saying I’m referring to Cyber Security which is a distinct discipline which many nibble around the edges without any in depth knowledge or experience. 

So, what does a Board Advisor do? 

Board Advisors help to guide businesses but are not legally authorised to bind them. As companies establish themselves, moving from an idea to a fully structured and realised organisation, they typically prepare for full operation, sales, and/or fundraising, and in my case, Cyber Security.

As they begin these processes, experts in the field – including mentors or specialists brought into the organisation by a mentor – become hugely valuable as the organisation works to achieve its goals. Advisors are key assets, and it’s crucial to formalise exactly what they will provide, their availability, who they can introduce you to, and how much time they can give you – as well as how they will be compensated in exchange for these services.  A board advisor can help fill in any gaps in your team in terms of both experience and expertise. They can also help you bring in new team members and sometimes sources of funding as opportunities allow. Most crucially, they can do all of this while giving you time to think about what you need to be doing to grow your business, or just get it and keep it, running.

Board Advisors are also far more flexible, offering services either on an ongoing basis, in parallel to a Board of Directors, or as part of your transition into a formal, Board-run business.  In other words, they are not full time employees, but work on a part time basis where you pay them for their time, bounded as you see fit.

How does a board advisor add value?

In terms of cyber security, a Board Advisor is an experienced cyber security professional who provides advice and support to a business’s leadership without sitting on their Board. They provide counsel based on their prior experience in this field to help the Board make decisions, especially when faced with unfamiliar challenges.  And most challenges in the field of Cyber Security will be unfamiliar to them. 

When working as an advisor it is essential that we are excellent coaches and can demonstrate our deep knowledge of the subject.  We need to take both their board members, their in house IT teams and IT users, getting them onside and letting them know that we are there to enhance their knowledge and skills, we are not their enemies.  We must also be prepared to work with any IT company they may have under contract, although that can be a bigger challenge.

Summary

Having a Board Advisor who can mentor the leadership team and other employees, either on a retainer or paid for actually hours worked, can be a great boon for an SME.  Just having someone who can debunk the myths and devise strategy, training programmes and advise on cyber risk, is something that any SME management team should value.

Happy New Year and welcome to my first blog post of 2024.  For my theme I thought I’d expand on a post I made earlier this week on LinkedIn, about how cyber security is viewed by many SMEs and explore why that view appears to be paramount.  I am pretty much of the view that the attitude I’m about to expand on, is as much the fault of the cyber security industry, as anything else.

We tend to flood potential clients with adverts and articles, mainly focused on technology.  Many of this comes from sales, rather than from the seasoned cyber security experts, that you might wish it did.

Let me give you a couple of quotes.  The first comes from a renowned Harvard scientist and cyber security specialist.  He says, ‘If you think technology can solve your security problems, then you don’t understand the problems and you don’t understand the technology’.’  The second comes from Joe Longo, the Chair of the Australian Securities & Investments Commission.  He says, ‘If boards do not give cybersecurity and cyber resilience sufficient priority, this creates a foreseeable risk of harm to the company and thereby exposes the directors to potential enforcement action by ASIC based on the directors not acting with reasonable care and diligence.’

Boil that down and they are saying that this is not an IT issue, it’s a business issue.  That’s not discounting technology’s role but without integrating it with PEOPLE and PROCESS, we’re only curing half the ailment. When advising a company’s leaders, we must not only identify the threats but also gauge vulnerability to these threats and ascertain the risk to the business. Only then can we craft a solution that harmoniously unites People, Process, and Technology.

Perhaps because there is a considerable amount of what we call FUD, fear, uncertainty and doubt, doing the rounds constantly, it concentrates people on thinking about specifics, instead of looking at the bigger picture.  Whilst there is no doubt that phishing, ransomware, and other scams have certainly concentrated the mind somewhat, and these attacks are most definitely not confined to the large enterprise businesses, but have been attacking, with a lot of success, the small to medium business market, this causes vendors to try and exploit the issues around that and push their technology solutions and of course, SMEs rarely, if ever, have the expertise to judge whether or not a particular product will actually give them the protection they need.  We now must add into the mix AI and its capacity for increasing cyber-attacks at all levels, making the production of code, so much easier and making it available to those perhaps less skilled than heretofore.

As we travel around and visits clients or potential clients, it is common to find that they have the view that adequate security is provided by technology.  They rely on their IT provider to provide the guidance they need which tends to involve firewalls, anti-malware software and perhaps a backup regime.  All well and dandy.  Let’s just remind ourselves of the quote from Bruce Schneier:

‘If you think technology can solve your security problems, then you don’t understand the problems and you don’t understand the technology’. 

So, what does he mean?  As he’s not here to ask I suggest what he’s saying is that essentially the technology available can be an essential part of your protection but it has to be targeted in the right way, which not only means you have the right piece of kit doing the right thing, but that you are targeting your IT spend to support your business goals and give a maximum return on investment (ROI).  It should also be married to good policies and processes that are enforceable and auditable and fully understood by your work force.  To do this you have to understand exactly what your risks, vulnerabilities and threats are to ensure that your solution to those risks, vulnerabilities, and threats, is targeted for maximum effect and ROI and that the technology is supporting the policies and processes, all of which is underpinned with good security awareness training.

It’s also necessary to have some form of measuring the effectiveness of your solutions through a protective monitoring solution.  Such solutions for SMEs have long been considered too expensive to even consider, even though it provides a set of cybersecurity practices and measures aimed at safeguarding an SMEs digital assets and sensitive information.

But first and foremost, you need to identify the risks that you face. How can you identify that risk and then mitigate it?  Taking risks is a part of business.  You assess risk every day when doing business.  Do you want to do this deal?  What happens if it goes not as expected?  Do I want to take this person on?  Etc etc etc.  Whether you formally undertake a risk assessment or whether you assess that risk informally, you are working out what is appropriate to a level that is consistent with the risk that your organisation is prepared to take.  Failure to do that will almost certainly be damaging to your business, perhaps fatally so. 

Within SMEs the difference between assessing day to day business risk and assessing risk to information assets, is one of understanding.  What is an information asset?  Note the word ‘information’ rather than IT.  It is the information contained within the IT system that is the important asset, not the piece of hardware it is sitting on.  You understand your business risk, after all it is your business, but do you understand information risk?  Do you have a clear idea of what information assets you have and where they are?  Before you answer that think it through.  Do you really know where all the data is?  OK, you know that you have a server or servers and that somewhere in those servers there is a bunch of data which runs your business.  How much of that data has been saved onto staff workstations when they needed it to carry out some work?  How much has been copied off somewhere else for what was probably a very good reason at one point?  How well is your firewall functioning?  Can malware work its way onto the network because the firewall does not have Universal Threat Management installed and can therefore be probing the servers and workstations.  I could go on.

The first thing to understand is that these risks are owned by the board, and if you don’t have a formal board, then the management team.  That needs to be understood fully by those at the top.  That team needs to understand what level of risk is acceptable and agree what risks you are prepared to tolerate to achieve your business aims.   You need to ensure that supporting policies are produced, implemented, understood by employees, and regularly reviewed and updated.  At H2 we tend to produce an information security and data protection handbook which can run into many pages.  Producing these policies is not as easy as it sounds.

You may also wish to look at some recognised standards by which you can regulate your risk management.  One such is the international standard for information security, ISO 27000 series but perhaps the most appropriate for SMEs is the Cyber Essentials Scheme which will help you demonstrate an appropriate level of information security and risk management within your company.

Once you have a risk management framework in place, owned from the top, then you can identify your information assets and assess the risk to your business should those assets be compromised in some way.  Then and only then can you adequately assess what processes and technologies you need to mitigate the risks identified for each asset thus targeting your spend for maximum effectiveness.

Sadly, that’s not the end.  User education is probably the most important element of all for an SME.  Ensuring that your staff are aware of the policies and why they exist.  Protect yourself against scams which sadly, form the biggest danger to SMEs rather than hacks.  Scams can be very low tech or high tech using malware, but however they come in, your staff need to be aware of them.