The Successful Business "If you want to climb a mountain, start at the top of the mountain." Implicit within this analogy is an underlying need. That need is for C-Suite executives to know how each department, function, team and individual will be performing when the business is successful.

If vested interests try to sabotage the IT strategy – it’s working An IT strategy is probably the most important document that a Chief Information Officer (CIO) produces – and the most difficult to get right. Done well, by someone who has a broad overview of both business goals and the emerging IT landscape, it provides the IT roadmap for the business to forge ahead in the next five to ten years. Done poorly, done too late, or not done at all – a commoner state of affairs than one might think – it dooms the organisation to underperformance and poor productivity.

The British government have promised to spend £150m on its cyber defences against the “growing threat” of cyber-attacks. This follows on from WannaCry which struck last year and affected nearly 600 GP practices and 80 trusts.

A popular fitness and nutrition app ‘MyFitnessPal’ has suffered the largest data breach of 2018 so far affecting 150 million accounts. Hackers got away with usernames, email addresses and hashed passwords.

Data protection and privacy is expected across the internet nowadays. Data privacy concerns have been up in the air as multiple stories emerge concerning what companies do with people’s data and who they share this with.

Have you entered The Internet of Things (IoT) yet?

2017 has been a big year concerning cyber security, positively and negatively. The rise of Ransomware into the mainstream news with global attacks on businesses and record numbers of data breaches such as Yahoo having one billion accounts accessed by hackers. IT security is one of the fastest moving industries, and it's vital that every business tries to keep up and stay protected.

Your business is only as secure as how you store and manage your passwords. Often overlooked, passwords are the first line of defence to protecting your business from anyone and a strong password can often make the difference. However sometimes no matter how strong a password is they still fall into the wrong hands. How passwords are stored plays a vital role in the safety of your business and ensuring that only authorised users can access approved applications.

1.4 Billion hacked and leaked passwords have been collated in a single file and are currently sitting on the dark web. Security firm 4iQ who discovered the files say that rather than this being a new breach it is a collection of several previous breaches. None of the passwords are encrypted and all the data has been put into a searchable, interactive database.

Risk plays a critical role in almost every business decision with business executives having to balance risk and reward if they want to be successful. IT is often overlooked with other risks being valued with more importance; IT vulnerability isn’t even considered a board level problem in many cases. Failure to identify, assess and mitigate IT risk sets your business up for security breaches and financial losses down the line.