In today’s world of business, data is king. The rise of convenient business tools has driven many business processes online. All in all, the growth of cyberspace has made business easier.
Because of increased digitization-including remote work-a data breach or cyber crisis is an increasingly common occurrence. However, it’s one that your team can prepare for.
Having a solid cyber crisis communication plan can help your team mitigate communication problems, data loss, and damage to your brand reputation. Here’s how to build a cyber crisis plan for communication, what it involves, and why you need one.
What is a cyber crisis communication plan?
A cyber crisis communication plan is a strategy that your organization should have in place to outline communication processes in the case of a cyber crisis.
A cyber crisis might include any digital outage or breach that could halt or severely limit your business operations. Every cyber crisis is different, and can include:
- Failure of cloud-based communication systems.
- Cyber attacks and hacks.
- Accidental data loss.
- Massive loss of business or application data.
All of the above are different scenarios, but what they have in common is the potential to hugely impact your business processes and cause damage to revenue and reputation.
What’s important here is how you communicate about the crisis and throughout its duration, which may include your CRM or call center software, email, or a specialist internal communications system.
Having the right evaluations, tools and training in place is essential, which is why an important element of your plan is your communications system. Using your 8×8 VoIP phone with intelligent routing is a great way to ensure that calls get to the right person, first time.
For maximum effectiveness, your cyber crisis communication plan should include:
- Your method of communication.
- Who you’ll communicate with and the information that you need to give.
- How you’ll mitigate problems resulting from system failure or data breaches.
- What you’ll do to resolve the issue.
Your plan will be most effective when drawn up separately from your overall crisis communication plan. This is because a cyber crisis is often sudden and unpredictable: you might only find out about an attack long after it’s been carried out. Trends in risk management indicate that cyber crises are likely to become more common, so it’s important to have a comprehensive strategy against them.
Why have a plan for communication in a cyber crisis?
Modern, cloud-based communication and data storage systems are generally stable and reliable. All the more reason to keep your strategy up-to-date and have regular training on what to do when things go wrong.
A cyber crisis is particularly important to manage because of the potential scope of a breach or system failure.
For example, consider a data breach of customer names and addresses. In the world of brick-and-mortar, this would have meant a singular copy of this data being taken physically from storage. In contrast, data on a server is easily copied and potentially hard to track once it’s gone, making an avoidable data breach even harder to recover from.
Another pertinent example is company-wide communications systems. With more and more processes going digital, teams often rely on digital communications across a wide geographical area. If your in-house system fails, how will an employee in New York keep in touch with their colleague in London?
Quite simply, you need a backup plan for when large, all-encompassing systems fail.
How to build your cyber crisis communication plan
To build a solid cyber crisis plan, including protecting critical communications, you need to consider a wide range of factors and make your plan known to every member of your team.
1. Conduct a risk assessment
The first thing to do is conduct a robust risk assessment. This will show you where cyber crises may come from ahead of time, allowing you to plan for the most likely scenarios first. Consider every platform, tool, and storage device where data is held and the risks associated with each, from your CRM and accounting software to Facebook lead data and email lists.
Your risk assessment should include:
- What could go wrong?
- What is the likelihood of each event?
- How can these events be prevented?
- What would be the best and worst outcomes of each scenario?
- What will you do in case of a crisis?
This risk assessment should be applied to every area of your business where cyber products are used in key processes. Be sure to run a thorough project review process on your proposed solution to ensure that it is in keeping with your other business processes.
2. Consider communication priorities
One of the major ways that cyber crises can be minimized is by having a clear chain of command and order of communication.
For example, consider a large data leak that occurs within your business. You are the first to notice the error and aren’t sure who to contact first. Telling no one, or the wrong person, could result in panic among colleagues and customers, and cause damage to your brand reputation.
On the other hand, informing the project manager and your supervisor can help get the situation quickly resolved – thus reducing harm to your customers and business. This can then be communicated to the relevant people. For example, a global company might have someone on hand that is trained in remote desktop management – so that they are able to fix the issue, wherever they are in the world.
3. Be solution-focused
You might think of cyber crisis communication as a PR exercise. You’ve got to make sure that your customers are reassured, right?
Not necessarily. While this is important, your plan should be solution-focused, identifying responsibility for solving the crisis and communicating to your team and stakeholders the steps you are taking to minimize damage. If you take care of the problem quickly, your public image will take care of itself.
4. Assign roles
In a cyber crisis communication plan, everyone needs to have a role and know who is doing what.
Have experts on hand if necessary to ensure clear communication. These may include general or technical translation experts, interpreters, PR personnel, or HR professionals.
To protect your communications during an incident, you should assign roles for internal and external communications, damage limitation, service restoration and investigations. This way, your team can take action immediately and limit damage to your brand and customers.
Recovering from a cyber crisis
While it’s great to be prepared for a cyber crisis, there are ways that you can avoid one in the first place. Using an up-to-date communication system with in-built security is a must, where security and backups are typically handled by the provider (the experts).
Finally, after a crisis occurs, make sure to conduct a thorough post-mortem to find out exactly what went wrong, and what can be done to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
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