It’s time to craft a robust cyber strategy specific to your business 

Headlines point to a growing trend: Instances of data breaches continue to rise — exposing both employers and employees to increased cyber risk and vulnerability. According to Mercer’s 2024 Global Talent Trends research, only 55% of executives are very confident that their company is constantly updating its cyber-risk protocols to deal with new threats. Today, threats to organizations include the employer ecosystem, as well as their individual team members and their families. An effective cyber strategy addresses both prongs.

Enterprise risk used to be more centralized in physical locations. Now, work-from-home broadens network security and VPN necessities for data integrity and protection. The personal use by employees of company-leased equipment, such as laptops and mobile devices, is creating opportunities for company data and intelligence to be exposed. And there have been heightened attempts to infiltrate employer networks to take advantage of employees’ email dependence and distraction to place ransomware. Attacks are becoming even more advanced with the rise of AI.

For employees, the connected 24/7 nature of remote work and online behavior increases the need for privacy and protection of their personal information. Identity theft protection now includes personal and family cybersecurity as threats have expanded beyond credit monitoring to include health and tax fraud, unemployment fraud, children’s online presence and more. Identity theft restoration efforts cost employees money and productivity, especially without the help of outside support.

Protecting businesses and people online

Fortified cyber and identity protection strategies help mitigate cyber and identity threats, offer remediation services and put a measure of control back into the hands of organizations and consumers.

With media events fueling buzz and awareness, employer adoption in risk prevention has seen an uptick, but there is room for improvement. While employers take backroom strides to defend their business security, offering employee-facing identity and cyber protection options proactively versus reactively is particularly important.

Employers can take the following steps to expand their risk awareness and explore measures to build resiliency for them and their employees:

• Assess organizational risk through benchmarking and risk quantification exercises. Complete business risk assessment to acknowledge and plan for current gaps, as well as view industry prevalence to gauge percentage of peers offering protection for their employees’ identity and cyber presence.
• Formalize incident management measures. Tighten up internal plans on cyber issue control before incident response action is necessary. For employee-facing plans, ensure identity theft remediation services are easily accessible.
• Establish vendor relationships. Vetting cybersecurity partners and identity and cyber protection carriers takes initial work, but making the right vendor decisions reduces disruption to employers and employees. Your vendor of choice should outline roadmaps for protection, ongoing success and future enhancement plans, plus allow you to ensure those measures align with your organization.

Today’s ever-connected digital world makes it even more challenging to stay ahead of the evolving cyber risks. Moving into tomorrow, there’s even greater intersection between company cyber insurance and personal employee protection plans. It begs the question, could “bundling” employer-paid identity and cyber protection with a discount on their corporate cyber insurance be the next frontier in this space?

With a new year coming into focus, crafting or updating a robust cyber strategy specific to your business and employee needs should be a priority. Just as cyberattacks are becoming more sophisticated, so will the measures to prevent them – proactively and predictively.