37 Cybersecurity Awareness Month Quotes from Industry Experts in 2023

“There’s not a one-size-fits-all approach to securing healthcare,” McGladrey said. “All organizations are doing the best they can, working hard against insurmountable odds. It’s important to respect and understand not where they are relative to the standard, but how they’ve improved over time.”

It’s no surprise that security and compliance professionals are concerned about the effects a potential recession may have on their budgets. Cyber incidents and business interruptions have been the two worldwide corporate risk concerns for two years running, according to Allianz, and the World Economic Forum recently found that cybersecurity is the fifth top risk worldwide in 2023. Yet, over 66,000 tech jobs were cut in the first two months of 2023 due to recessionary factors, and over half of organizations struggle with identifying where the critical risks are in order to figure out what remediations to prioritize. The risk of paying fines and penalties is increasing as the FTC, SEC, NYDFS, and other regulatory agencies are leaning into enforcement rather than sanctions.

Let’s examine an end-to-end process that organizations can use annually to evaluate which controls are effectively reducing risks, and which controls could be removed or replaced to create budgetary efficiencies

Communications are critical for an organization when an incident occurs. Leadership must effectively share information with the workforce. For some organizations, this requires enacting the critical communications plan that has been drilled. For others, an incident is a disruption to the normal course of business, which is where business continuity planning demonstrates its value to the organization.

At the end of January 2020, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) approved the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) with plans to apply this new standard to up to 3,000 subcontractors by the end of 2020. How does this apply to your organization?

“You can never get risk to zero, but you can mitigate risk to an acceptable level for that agency or that project,” McGladrey says. “You need to know what risks you can accept and what you have done to mitigate the potential damage associated with those risks.”