As we have seen in the news, cybersecurity is more important than ever. In order to protect your company and customers’ data, it is essential to comply with all applicable regulations. Not only will you be protecting your business and customers, but you will also attract new clients who are interested in partnering with a secure company.
When it comes to cybersecurity, compliance is key. There are a number of compliance standards, such as HIPAA and SOC2, that all companies might need to adhere to. By meeting those standards, you can show your commitment to cybersecurity and demonstrate that you are taking the necessary steps to keep your data and your clients data safe.
We also need to make it clear that compliance is just the starting point. Being compliant does not mean being secure: compliance is a status, security is an ongoing practice.
A lot of companies that are in the security business can make your product, service or entire business compliant to regulations, but few actually help improve your cybersecurity posture at the same time. At CryptoArmor, we decided to merge these two key aspects so everything we do for cybersecurity helps adhere to necessary compliance frameworks as well.
Investing in cybersecurity should be seen as an investment from the company, not as a cost. A cost is just a liability, while an investment has the potential to generate benefits to the company making it.
Here are some insights about how and why cybersecurity is an investment, not a cost:
- Attracts more business. With more and more companies making headlines with 8 to 9 figures of money lost during hacks, people are starting to pay attention to where they invest/hold their money and blockchain assets. Since no one is interested in losing money, showing a stronger-than-usual cybersecurity policy and strategy can help your company win more clients.
- Maintains trust and transparency. Audits like the SOC2 let people know that you follow specific data management processes, so they know their data is safe with you.
- Helps avoid disruptions like intellectual property theft, data breaches and, like we’re increasingly seeing in web3, direct financial damages. Like we said before, security is not a status, it’s an ongoing practice, so being compliant to a regulation or audit procedures is only one of the steps in order to keep yourself and your customers’ safe from attacks.
As we mentioned before, compliance is just one of the first steps in order to keep data safe. Compliance makes your clients understand that you care and that your system is more attack-avert than others, but it’s not keeping you completely safe.
In order to get that higher standard of safety, you need the one thing that matches great with compliance and completes the puzzle: a proactive cybersecurity strategy.
With a proactive cybersecurity strategy, you’re strongly mitigating the risk of being hacked.
Being reactive means always being a step behind, while being proactive means to prevent an attack rather than to fix it. Part of being proactive is also to comply with the regulations and standards of the industry, but this is just a first step. Considering that cybersecurity threats are not static and criminal hackers are always evolving, other essential parts of a proactive cybersecurity strategy is validation and penetration testing combined.
So, after considering the importance of a proactive cybersecurity strategy, including the compliance to industry regulations and standards (and maybe also a little bit more), we can add another benefit for great cybersecurity practices:
4. Increases business continuity. This is one of the most important results of a cybersecurity strategy. When an attack happens, especially in web3, we have seen
multiple protocols or entire chains to halt in order to detect the piece of code that was exploited and fix it without losing further money or information. Halting a
blockchain, a protocol or an entire business is strongly harmful both for the cash flow and for its reputation.
Choosing/happening to not comply with the required frameworks and standards is an expensive move from a branding, safety and monetary standpoint. Your customers, users and investors will surely not be happy of the cyber attack your systems just received and of all the data that have been stolen, but will be even more disappointed when they see that you just got charged a fine of hundreds of thousands of dollars for not being compliant to the regulations (perfectly like it happened to the Oklahoma State University, which paid a whopping $875,000 to settle HIPAA violations).
Just to mention a few more, Amazon and Instagram got fined, respectively, $877 millions and $403 millions because of lack of compliance with the European GDPR and T-Mobile paid $350 millions to settle a class action lawsuit following a data breach that impacted 77 million people.
So, I think now it’s pretty clear that compliance and security are pretty serious matters. The T-Mobile example is very interesting and a little bit different compared to the others as they did not have a compliance problem, but instead had a security problem…which made them pay top dollar in order to settle the lawsuit coming from it.
CryptoArmor is a blockchain Cybersecurity-as-a-Service that builds proactive security strategies in order to keep your business and customers safe.
Request a connection inside CryptoArmor by sending an email at: info@cryptoarmor.net
