Securing your start up

Perhaps you have been harbouring desires to build your own business for a few years. You have a unique idea that you believe will offer potential customers a fantastic new product or service. Maybe you have already made that leap and have been slowly building out an idea and treating your new business with the same amount of love and nurture you would with a child!

But wait, amongst all the hard work and growing aspirations, a threat looms on the horizon. The thought of a cyber-attack against your new business. What happens if your systems aren’t available to you, what happens when your idea has been stolen or your systems accessed by someone with no right to do so?

You instinctively know you must protect your intellectual property, after all it is the crown jewels of your business, your biggest digital asset. You know you must protect your financial investment. You know you must protect your customers. But at the same time, you realise that you must innovate, you must be agile, you must move at pace. Let’s be honest, an overzealous approach to cyber security is something that could strangle innovation, frustrate staff and in the end damage your business.

Of course, the opposite is true, too few cyber security controls and your fledgling business might not ever get off the ground. What a thought to consider that after all your early morning starts, customer presentations and dedication to your business that cyber criminals then steal your idea or lock you out of your own systems. Worse still, they could also steal your customers information and tarnish your reputation for good.

So, how do you successfully secure a start-up? With a graduated approach to cyber security.

Start-up businesses are like any other successful business, they mature and grow over time. Both regarding the number of customers they have and the digital landscape that allows them to deliver excellence to those customers. This is the key. A graduated cyber security approach should be aligned to the maturity and current cyber exposure the company has. This means looking at the key cyber risks that face the company through their maturing process and compliment that growth with right sized and appropriate cyber security controls at that time.

Unfortunately to many start-up organisations don’t get the balance right because they don’t use a risk-based approach to cyber security. They then end up with either highly restrictive controls that inhibit business growth or not enough controls that risk the future of the company.

Finding the right level of cyber security is so important and taking a graduated approach, carefully selecting the key cyber controls needed at each phase of the company’s growth is the answer.

Third Party Cyber Security (TPCS) are experts in delivering cyber security to start-ups. We have delivered cyber excellence to individual start-ups as well as much larger scale-up factories involving multiple new companies. We understand the need to align growth and cyber security and ensure a well-protected but agile and innovative company is built over time.

Written by Kenny Boyce, CEO @ Third Party Cyber Security.

#duediligence #cyber #redflag #venturecapital #privateequity

ASSESS. INVEST. PROTECT.™