Around about 12 to 18 months ago I invited one of my friends to come and be part of the Campbell Clinic Group business.
Stuart and I have been friends for over 15 years, enjoying cinema club together every month in one of the most extraordinary joyful sequences of my life.
Through all that time Stuart worked for one of the local councils in IT infrastructure projects, some of those projects were very large, and Stuart's understanding of IT at that level, of large-scale projects and scope and of safety and security is extraordinary.
Initially Stuart came into our business as sales and business development director, but it was a way of getting Stuart and his expertise into the business.
We've cracked sales out of that job and put it somewhere else, but the business development and IT infrastructure directorship has become greater and greater day by day and week by week.
One of the reasons that this is really important is because for the past 15 years or so everybody in the world has ran as fast as they can to give all their data to somebody else.
Everybody gives their email address away at the drop of a hat, allows cookies, lets people in your world, let all the tendrils of other organisations grab into your data, into your personal life, into your profile, and strip it out. People do that to get ‘free’ access to apps, social media platforms, and the rest.
It's always worth remembering that ‘if you're not the customer then you are the product’. What most people don't understand as they use Instagram or Facebook or any number of social media platforms like this, is that they are the product that is being sold by the company, not the platform.
What happens with this though, and in the broader sense is that we then open ourselves up to the opportunity to be robbed, raided, sacked, effectively integrated by darker forces who want to have a go at us.
It's no problem for individuals because we feel as if we're too small a target to get hit or hacked. The big guys, the hackers, the people who want the money, they go after the big companies where they can have ransom, but it's worth it and worth the effort, for small businesses, it seems the same, isn't it?
We've watched recently as Marks and Spencer's and Co-op in the United Kingdom have been attacked by cyber criminals and the cost to the businesses has been enormous, Jaguar, Land Rover too, but as we have our own small businesses, we think there is no problem there.
The difficulty now though, is that the threat of cybersecurity has shifted, not from individuals who are trying to go to your business, but from systems, from bots, from AI, and so they won't care now the size of the business, they'll only care about the weakness.
Small businesses, individuals, they become such easy low hanging fruit, those who have not secured themselves. It's dead simple to get in there through your Gmail account, you just have to click wrong once and you're got.
Nobody has the time to pay any attention to this, but if one of the walls of your house had fallen down and people could walk freely in there you would probably take the time and the expense to fix it. The analogy's the same.
It's taken me a year to 18 months to understand this and that coincides directly with working professionally and daily with Stuart. At the start, there was a tension between us because I thought he was far too aggressive in his approach to security, but as time dawned on, I became more and more terrified and more and more aware of just exactly what could happen and how bad it could be.
We're moving into a new stage now, time to sit back, reassess and as they say in The Art of War, “re-secure your boundary”.
Blog Post Number - 4494
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