Do Businesses need Incident Response Teams?
Every security experts agree that each company has to have a team that can do
incident handling responsibilities; however, many companies are not interested in that idea. According to a recent survey, almost 25 percent of the companies in the country have suffered security and data breaches. Among them 25 percent conducted expert analysis after the breach and only half of them has taken steps to protect their system. Thus, it is very important to have a team dedicated to incident response, but in reality only few companies have them.
Some, organizations and companies may conduct incident response training for their incident response teams, while some have different approaches like hiring other professionals to handle the job, and still others don’t have anything at all. These companies are just waiting for another attack before they decide to have someone to help them against cyber threats. To some companies, it is much better to opt for the services of some organization that offer incident response, organizations like McAfee, Dell SecureWorks, Verisign iDefense, Sword & Shield, CyberEvidence or Mandiant. And now, more organizations are joining the fray and with their addition means more help for the business industry.
If cyber attacks and security breaches are handled the wrong way, then companies would lose substantial amount of finances; it can incur not only huge losses in the company but soft losses as well such as damage to reputation and loss of customers. So to some companies, it is much better to bring in the experts for this matter. However, some companies have dedicated in-house incident response teams that can do the job. Sometimes when companies happen to fall victim to data breaches, their incident response teams have two options to make after the data breach. The first one is to fix the system as soon as possible and the other is to figure out how exactly the attack happened.
When companies consider hiring security organizations to responds to incidences, there is always a catch in hiring their services. Indeed, they may have better experience, skills and capabilities to do the job, but there are some clients who will have a hard time trusting them. It is because, companies will allow these individuals to dive-in their data systems and they are afraid that the data they have can be further compromised by showing it to complete strangers.
Still, companies will need a third party organization to cater to that problem and the reason is the nature of their work. Company heads and employees would go on with their regular work each day then suddenly data breaches happen. When it happens the records they have will be compromised and then the company will be troubled on how to fix the mess that they are in. But with the help of incident response teams from third party organizations, these problems can be handled effectively at a fraction of a cost compared to maintaining an in-house incident response team.
Maintaining an in-house incident response team can be costly to some companies. They have to hire new employees, pay them, give those employees benefits and provide incident handling training for them. Sadly, not all companies have the ample resources and finances to maintain a dedicated in-house incident response team. Only large companies can afford them, companies like the Fortune 100 types of companies. But that does not really mean that other companies should avoid considering this idea. Even if they are small companies, they should adopt some sort of methods or techniques without spending too much money – it is all about the balance between the risk and also the cost.
Some companies won’t need to hire employees and have them undergo incident response training. Companies could have someone or a team who can mitigate the risk of incidents and this can make a huge difference on their company – by carefully studying their firewall, securing their security system and carefully watching what is happening on the company’s network some incidents can be prevented.
Many security experts stress the importance of providing security to the networks of businesses. Once these networks are compromised it would incur losses to the company. Indeed, incidents can be mitigated by careful preparation, tougher network security and watchful eye. But when incidents happen, it is important to have an incident response team, whether hiring third party organization or an in-house team.
The International Council of E-Commerce Consultants (EC-Council) is a member-based organization that certifies individuals in cybersecurity and e-commerce. It is the owner and developer of 20 security certifications. EC-Council has trained over 90,000 security professionals and certified more than 40,000 members. These certifications are recognized worldwide and have received endorsements from various government agencies. They also offer trainings in incident handling.
More information about EC-Council is available at http://www.eccouncil.org.
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