In this day and age, everyone is at risk of cyber threats. Small businesses are just as vulnerable to cyber attacks as much as the Fortune 500 companies. The question is, what measures should be implemented to prevent such threats? In an interesting discussion, Doug DePeppe, Hilary Wells, Ed Barkel and Bill Nelson explore why small businesses must start paying attention to cybersecurity as well as the importance of protecting their customers, their employees, and their data from cyber breach. They talk about the unseen risks brought about by cyber threats to both start-ups and major corporations and share tips on what organizations can do to enforce reasonable security measures and have a proper “cyber hygiene.”

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Cybersecurity Panel with Doug DePeppe, Hilary Wells, Ed Barkel and Bill Nelson

We have a unique podcast. We would call this a panel. There is Doug DePeppe. We have Hilary Wells, Ed Barkel and Bill Nelson. Doug is with https://eosedgelegal.com/ (EOS Edge). Hilary, Ed and Bill are with https://www.lrrc.com/ (Lewis Roca Rothgerber Christie). What we’re going to talk about is cybersecurity. Tell us about your business and who you serve.

We’re a full-service firm. We will talk a little bit later about how we’ve formed a strategic alliance with EOS Edge. We represent companies everywhere from banking to insurance companies to investment advisors, healthcare schools and manufacturing, everything in between. What we found is that all of our clients have access to data. That data needs to be secured. We’ve developed this group to work with our clients and help them, especially the small to medium size clients, develop systems, processes and methodology so that they can help keep their company data safe. Maybe even more importantly, their clients’ data safe.

You have been thinking about as a small business owner. Ten, fifteen years ago, I didn’t even need to think about this. I talked to a couple of groups here and their age was similar to mine. Most of them don’t use LinkedIn. Most of them don’t look at their email. What I would think is the awareness of the smaller business owner is not that high. Why did you form what you formed? What was the motivating factor?

What we did is we followed our clients and their path through data protection and cyber issues. Data protection, as far as a large industry that first encountered it, was the healthcare industry with the passage of HIPAA. As Ed said, we represent a lot of insurance companies. We represent hospitals systems. We saw that group be the first to try to tackle what information they were collecting, what they were doing to store it, then their obligations to protect it. The financial services industry was next. We had Gramm-Leach-Bliley and other regulations from FINRA come out. Our regulators are now requiring us to have these plans, these systems and these policies. How do we do this and how do we stay compliant? In the past five years, what we’ve seen is we’ve gone from regulated entities who are doing what they had to do because they were told to do so to an interesting standard that’s developed for all industries across the spectrum regardless of whether or not a regulator is directing what you do and how you do it.

It’s finding the customers or making buying decisions in part based on how are you doing in this field? If I’m going to trust you with my information, how do I know that you’re doing what you can to protect it? That’s not a Facebook problem. It’s not a Twitter problem. Businesses of all sizes have employee information. They have customer information. They have information to be protected. What we’ve done is we’ve transitioned from advising on what the law is,