Building a company’s brand reputation today largely depends on how the company deals with cyber security. Many companies nowadays work remotely, which implies using cloud services for the daily ongoing processes. 

While this is an important upgrade in terms of communication and flexibility, if data protectionin this environment is not proper, it can lead to data breaches and damage to the company’s reputation.   

Based on CISO’s Benchmark Report, during the last 3 years, the number of businesses that suffer from brand reputation damage due to data breaches has increased from 26% to 33%.  

Relationship between brand reputation and cyber security 

To understand the relationship between brand reputation and cyber security, the starting point is to know the meaning of these terms and why they are important for businesses.  

Brand reputation is the reason why customers choose to give their trust and invest money using the products or services of a particular company.  

To see a company as reliable, customers must be sure that their data is in safe hands and that is why the company must present itself as a high-security aware one to get and save their trust.  

Here comes Cyber Security as a set of technologies and processes gathered intending to protect systems, networks, programs, devices, and data from cyber-attacks.  

1. Data breaches and customer trust  

SMBs and large enterprises are always vulnerable to cyber attacks. As a brand, the company is responsible for protecting the client’s data.  

Data breaches or data leak is the release of sensitive, confidential, or protected data to an untrusted environment.   

Information leakage, as unauthorized copying or transmission of data without affecting the source data, can also be involved during data breaches.  

It can occur as a result of a hacker attacking the business infrastructure or unintentional loss or exposure of data.   

While using the internet, customers are exposed through sharing their data to gain a personalized experience. If these data is collected for further marketing purposes it is important to have customer’s permission, trust and to handle the data properly.

2. Email communication and data protection 

Most companies use emails as a primary channel for business communication, both external and internal. While they are most common and practical for use, mailboxes can contain sensitive user and company data and that is why it is ocasionaly targeted by hackers. 

 The IT-sector should check and setup mailbox filters and encrypt emails. 

If mailboxes are not protected, hackers can get access to different pieces of information (such as marketing mailing lists of customers)- and they can use it to spread viruses to the company’s network or to use company’s identity to spread viruses to customers’ networks.

3. Secure advertising tracking technologies 

Securing advertising tracking technologies is based on permanent cooperation between Marketing teams and IT security. The marketing department should be updated with the results of each campaign. The tools which are measuring these data must be able to provide data visibility, management, and reporting. IT team should take care of the security of collected data and eliminate all potential risks which can endanger a brand’s reputation.

4. Outsourcing IT security

Outsourcing IT security companies might be one of the best solutions since these companies are highly specialised especially with online threats.   

With the outsourcing of IT security, the company can completely protect the business by securing critical access. The outsource IT partners can learn the employees about critical access management products they can use to protect their business from cyber threats like ransomware and data breaches, meet the compliance and regulatory requirements in their specific industry, get confidence in the business and strengthen their security culture.   

Communication strategy and proactive crisis management 

 Crisis management is a company’s strategic approach to acting if the cyber attacks actually happen.

The first part of this approach is the efficient communication strategy, which is a marketing role related to data security, and it is based on proactive planning and effective communication strategy.  

Communication plans should be highly efficient and up to date, to minimize the damage to a company’s reputation and to recover customers’ loyalty.

Cyber security rests on the whole team, which is why communication is one of the crucial factors in this strategy.  

A business can recover from financial losses but restoring the brand reputation is quite a difficult task.   

Therefore, all businesses should consider implementing a strategy for cyber security as a way to ensure customers that their data is safe and establish a trusted brand reputation.