I had a great time attending the Howard County Chamber of Commerce 2021 Cyber Risk Management Conference with my Aronson colleague, Mark Mensah. The fireside chats (sans the fireplace) were very informative and the moderators and panelists did an amazing job. I had never been to the Merriweather Pavilion before which was an added bonus.
A few quick takeaways from the event:
- Cyber awareness needs to be an ongoing activity across the entire organization. Believing staff can receive an annual security training and be equipped to spot the increasingly sophisticated phishing schemes out there is short sighted. At Aronson, we’ve moved to a continual security training model with bite sized content regularly delivered to our team members (and the testing that goes along with it).
- The importance of developing cyber resilience vs. just focusing on cyber defense. It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when. Scary thought really and I’m certainly doing all I can to postpone or prevent that “when” from happening for Aronson and our clients. However, the ability to respond effectively to an incident is just as important as the effort put into preventing your organization from being compromised.
Unfortunately, I missed out on the last chat on mitigating cyber risk. That’s because I received multiple notifications that MCPS was closing schools a couple hours early. I had to leave quickly to make it back to pick up my kids (yes, I did make it on time to both schools). The job of a dad is never done. 🙂
Looking forward to next year’s event.
