Free Cyber Resilience Workshop - Summary

Introduction

Hi there. Surviving Cyber offers a free cyber resilience workshop, "How small business owners can create their First Cyber Resilience Plan in less than 30 Days". I'm John Byrne and in this quick article, I'll be explaining a little about the workshop.  

Who is this workshop for?

Who is this workshop for? Well, it's for the owners and managers of small knowledge-based businesses who provide products and services based on what they know. That's a broad category, but it includes accountants, lawyers, insurance brokers, business consultants of all forms financial advisors, architects, engineers, and other real estate professionals, medical and IT industry professionals, and there are many, many more, all of whom run their businesses in a professional manner. But they want to be empowered to manage this risk, which is relatively new to them.

Now, they may be buying insurance to protect against legal liabilities arising from their business activities currently, but generally won't cover their cyber exposure. That form of insurance is known as professional indemnity insurance. Most importantly, these professionals will be concerned about the potentially catastrophic risk, which is financial, legal, and reputational that can arise from a cyber-attack. And they will be challenged by the complexity of this risk, not really sure that they're sufficiently in control of it.

What you will learn

So in the 60-minute workshop, you'll learn why your business needs a cyber resilience plan, the three "must-have" components of your plan, and why most people miss at least one of these, I'll explain my simple five-step framework that leads to cyber resilience, the five controls that reduce your exposure to the most common internet threats by 80%, and the important role that people can play both as a source of risk and as part of the defence that you have, and finally, how to build your own cyber resilience plan.

About John Byrne

So let me tell you a little bit about me. I'm John Byrne, as I said, and I've over 30 years as a financial risk assessment expert in the insurance industry. Now, I've been an entrepreneur for the last 15 years, I'm also a Chartered Certified Accountant, and I'm an insurance practitioner. Most importantly, I'm not an IT expert, because cyber risk is not about IT alone. I have 28 years in corporate roles with international banking and insurance groups as a financial risk assessment specialist. And as I said, for the last 14-15 years I've been an entrepreneur. I've co-founded an insurance underwriting business at Lloyds, the insurance market in London, and I've been chief risk officer of that business, which I exited in 2015. 

My Learning Journey

So, I've learned what I'm going to show you the hard way, it has taken me five years of learning, making mistakes along the way and figuring out this framework and the strategies and tactics that I'll share with you in the workshop. My focus during the last five years has been very different. I've been focused on the problems of small knowledge-based businesses, and I've been involved with an InsurTech business. And really what became very clear was the complexity of cyber risk, the focus of the market on technology solutions almost to the exclusion of other solutions, the low level of adoption of people training and awareness solutions generally in the market, and the lack of understanding that's out there around the topic of cyber insurance. So, as a result of the last five years, I formulated my simple framework, which I call the "Five Steps to Cyber Resilience", using my experience and my learning and I've implemented this in my own business. And I'm teaching it to other small business owners in the hope that it's useful to them. 

Your Choice

So, you can do this the hard way or the easy way. The hard way, I would say is to rely on "IT guy" to solve the issue without having any real idea of your digital risks. You could read every article, you could watch every video, you could follow every piece of advice, some of which is conflicting. You could spend years searching for an understandable approach to this topic of cybersecurity and cyber risk management. You can spend more and more on IT solutions hoping that you're reducing risk, and invest years of your life trying to upskill in cybersecurity, which is a highly technical subject. You could hire a cybersecurity expert for your own business, but they're in short supply and quite expensive. Or you could do nothing and hope that you're not hit by the cyber-attack. For me, this is the hard way to tackle the problem.  

First Cyber Resilience Plan

I offer you something different, a simple and proven way to create the first cyber resilience plan for your small business and to do this without having to become a cybersecurity expert or spend your time and your money looking for a solution that you hope will work. Would you like to learn my "Five Steps to Cyber Resilience" framework and create your first cyber resilience plan in the next 30 days? I'm hoping the answer to that is "yes" because that's what I want to show you how to do in the free cyber resilience workshop, "How small business owners can create their First Cyber Resilience Plan in less than 30 Days".