During the global pandemic, there was an increased need to grow your company’s online presence to connect with employees, customers, and prospective talent. However, the rapid change came with new concerns. Specifically, many companies faced increased security threats based on how they used technology to build an online presence.
Seemingly innocuous activity such as posting company updates on social media or creating new job postings on job sites created unintended risk for companies of all sizes from small businesses to corporations.
If you are looking to continue growing your online presence to support recruitment, retention, and customer engagement, you need to be aware of cyber threats and how to address these risks. This way, you can stay on track with your growth plans without exposing your company to negative consequences. Because the more information you put online, the more vulnerable your company could be to the threat of bad actors looking to exploit technology weaknesses.
Let’s examine how to balance your organization’s increasing online presence against growing security threats so that you don’t lose out on the benefits of using technology to support growth objectives.
The Power of Growing Your Online Presence
There are many compelling reasons to grow your online presence. For instance, online channels are a great way to recruit new talent that is interested in joining your team. This is especially important during the pandemic era where many organizations have moved their talent to virtual environments. Now, you can recruit talent that lives in another city, state, or country to fill a seat that previously only would have been filled by a person that was local or was willing to move.
Platforms like LinkedIn are also great for advertising your business’s efforts, vision, and history to your target audience. Many LinkedIn users use the site to develop their professional network, and you want to be part of the conversation. This includes connecting with future clients, employees, or customers. Using LinkedIn, organizations can share the projects, achievements, and goals their company champions through a personalized but professional medium.
Similarly, other online channels, such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter, can be an extremely effective PR tool to increase brand awareness. Being able to instantly communicate with potentially millions of users is worth pursuing and taking advantage of. This is because about 85% of consumers use websites and social media to conduct product research prior to their purchases. Optimizing this process can result in significant improvements to customer acquisition.
Online channels also create a certain level of legitimacy. Having a large number of followers on a given platform can increase your reputability as well as your credibility because new visitors intrinsically trust what you are putting online. Plus, it supports your recruiting efforts by marketing your company as an employer of choice for prospective talent.
But, an increase in your online profile could come at a cost. The greater your presence, the more online security concerns arise.
Leverage Security to Protect Your Online Presence
Every day, people around the globe interact with the Internet in some form. This volume of interaction is extremely valuable for companies, but it also opens the door to cyberattackers seeking to exploit vulnerabilities.
Two important technological tools for modern business are email and Internet, both of which are extremely vulnerable to cyberattacks. Rather than trying to penetrate digital firewalls directly, many threat actors will go after your people as the entry point. This is because attackers often view employees as the easiest access point to enter into a system. Schemes such as email phishing target employees who are connected to the Internet and unaware of how their online activity can be used to target them.
Consider this statistic. In 2016, only one in 130 emails was malicious. Now that number is closer to one in 50. With threats continuously increasing, there is a greater need for proactive and strategic solutions to solve cybersecurity challenges that align with your business need.
Think of it like this: Every person in your organization unintentionally poses a security threat, and every person potentially has multiple devices that they use (computer, tablet, phone, etc). As a result, the increase in risk as it relates to each individual in your firm has an exponential relationship, making it very complex to protect all assets at all times. However, you can’t turn off all company devices and send everyone home or the business would struggle to function.
Instead, the solution is to establish a clear line of sight on how to protect the business. There needs to be a balance of keeping the business running through the use of technology and being able to grow your online presence while also being considerate of cybersecurity issues. This calls for a strategy to support the safe use of technology to support business objectives.
How to Protect Company and Employee Data
Forrester predicts that annual cybersecurity spending will increase from its 2018 benchmark of $5.6 billion all the way to $12.6 billion by 2023. This rise in cybersecurity spend is brought about by an expected increase in remote work for companies of all sizes in the post-pandemic environment. This comes with a greater need to strategically implement security measures that protect data and systems as employees access the Internet and use email from home, from the coffee shop, or anywhere else outside of the office.
You don’t want to just throw money at the problem without considering the business need first. There is an opportunity to carefully review business objectives, then consider how technology can be deployed in a manner that sufficiently protects your assets, especially to prevent data loss and exploitation.
- Consider the type of data known as PII (personally identifiable information). PII is often overlooked when it comes to developing cybersecurity protocols. Brian Vecci of Varonis says, “Most companies aren’t prepared at all” for threats involving PII data, which can be accessed via network penetration through the means of phishing attempts by phishing attackers.
The glaring vulnerability of a social media presence is the display of PII data. While avenues like LinkedIn may be great for highlighting employee stories that reflect company culture, they can also expose sensitive information. A typical LinkedIn profile includes an employee’s current title, department, and years of service. If a threat actor wanted to infiltrate your company, they could find employees who currently work there and target them individually.
A Facebook profile provides more personal information when it comes to PII. Consider an employee who is an active Facebook or Instagram user. Threat actors could discover the employee’s age, birthday, family history, place of employment, and where they live. This treasure trove of information can then be used to infiltrate personal or corporate accounts and launch identity theft schemes. It’s why companies need to educate their employees about online security threats and how to do their part to prevent data breaches.
Even a company’s public status could threaten its online security. The public records of a business or corporation in newspapers, directories, and stockholder updates can raise serious online security concerns. Threat actors will look for any sliver of information, such as addresses or tax information, to find an opportunity to bypass firewalls and gain access to data or systems.
A significant challenge facing companies in this environment is determining the extent to which you protect user endpoints. This means setting the boundary between personal and company information. Not only does this choice affect your cybersecurity investment, but it also affects your employee privacy policy. The more you monitor and protect endpoints of your employees, such as company phones, the more you may have to take into consideration how you manage each device that participates in the company ecosystem.
One additional step you could take is to partner with your HR and legal teams to build or refine company policies that make it clear how your company is managing each device. Then, focus on proactively communicating the policy to your employees in a manner that facilitates understanding.
Partner with Business and Technology Experts
You want to get this right making intelligent investments in technology that align with the business need. Start with the business problem that needs to be solved:
- How does your company work today?
- How do you anticipate that it will function 5 years from now?
- How much of a shift to remote work do you expect in the short-term and long-term?
At NB Business Solutions, we start with the business challenge, then work toward building the right-size solution that leverages technology to solve the problem. We strive to balance your budget with the need to create operational efficiencies and strategically implement a layer of technology protection.
For us, it’s about collaboration. We focus on understanding how your business runs, how it needs to run, and how to prioritize the top problems that need to be solved. Then, we seek the answer to this important technology question: how can we ensure safety and security as your company continues to expand its online presence?
Because of our business expertise and deep bench of technology resources, we can implement the best solution to solve complex problems. We fill a need for growing companies that need to address increasingly complex and nuanced cybersecurity challenges without access to high-level technology leaders.
We fill this gap by solving the business problem through interim leadership and technology solutions. We have the capabilities to support the technology design and architecture that enables companies to safely grow their online presence in the face of growing security threats.
Consider working with our team to support your company. Through our proven approach of delivering business and technology solutions, we can help you realize the most benefit from engaging with the online world. Contact us today to discuss your business situation.