Fast Growth Companies depend on Rapid Expansion for their sustained growth. The combination of Fast Growing Companies' ability to grow rapidly through Speed, Innovation and Growth-Hacking leads to growth opportunities for them directly related to the rapid growth of these factors; however, this rapid growth for Fast Growing Companies will have a lot of Cybersecurity Issues associated with it that must be addressed in order to be able to continue growing as Fast-Growing Companies continue growing rapidly. Cybersecurity will struggle to keep up with this increase in Business Activity and will create threats for Businesses through potential Operational Risk created by Cyberattack’s; Financial Risk created by Cyberattacks; Reputational Risk created by Cyberattacks; and added Business Opportunity created by Cybersecurity being an ever-changing challenge to Cybersecurity professionals working within for Business’s.
Businesses become more Complex as they grow rapidly because their Digital Environment becomes larger and more Complex, with more Cloud Platforms; more Remote Workers; more 3rd Party Integration(s); more Software as a Service; and many Time Connected Devices. All of these systems generate exponentially larger Attack Surface areas for hackers. The larger an organization becomes the larger the organization’s attack surface area will be; and with every New System, Personnel or Integration that they deploy into their operations will add an additional Attack Vector on their overall Attack Surface Area for Hackers to attempt to exploit.
Priorities of fast growing businesses are generally product delivery, operational efficiency and customer acquisition. While these are necessary for growth, the sale of a company's product, services and or market will take precedence over security processes or technologies being put in place during the development of the new service, software and or market.
The accumulation of these disadvantages over time adds up to creating significant and extremely complex security risks.
As teams grow quickly, it becomes more difficult to manage user identities and permissions. Many Employees, contractors and vendors need access to various cloud applications or platforms. A company can increase their risk for excessive permissions, orphaned accounts, misconfigured authentication practices and unauthorized access to applications and data. Compromised credentials have become one of the biggest vectors of attack for businesses that continue to expand.
Businesses that scale quickly tend to rely on the agility and scalability of the cloud. However, as companies rapidly deploy their cloud services, they face the potential for misconfigured cloud storage, exposed API endpoints, unsecured workloads and lack of visibility across multi-cloud environments. Cloud environments are typically very dynamic, therefore if an organization does not have automated security controls and continuous monitoring in place, it may become increasingly difficult to identify security vulnerabilities or suspicious activity prior to an event taking place.
New employees coming on-board often face increased risk to being targeted with phishing and social engineering attacks. New hires are generally not familiar with corporate security policies and procedures, while fast paced work environments often require quick substantive decisions to be made without first verifying accuracy. Because of this urgency, malicious attackers target these employees with deceptive phishing emails to collect credential information from them.
As the growth of an organization’s infrastructure accelerates, security teams often encounter difficulties achieving centralized visibility of all their organization’s endpoints, identities, applications, and cloud environments. When organizations have multiple disconnected monitoring systems in place, there are blind spots created that can be exploited by any potential attackers.
Compliance and Regulatory Pressure
Without unified monitoring capabilities or the ability to identify threats and detect suspicious behaviour in near real-time, organizations may find it difficult to detect and respond to coordinated attacks.
As businesses scale, they must adhere to more stringent regulatory and compliance requirements related to operational resilience, data privacy, and cybersecurity. Further complicating matters is that when a business expands into a new industry or market, there will usually be additional compliance and regulatory requirements that will require greater levels of security and governance.
Fast-scaling organizations need their security strategies to be flexible, scalable, and aligned with their day-to-day operational growth. By investing in pro-active threat detection, employee awareness training, cloud governance, and incident response capabilities early on, organizations can build resilience against the continuously-evolving cyber threats they face. Organizations that develop their cybersecurity strategy early on will have a better chance of retaining customer trust, protecting their most critical assets, and creating a foundation for sustainable growth in the future.
To address these challenges effectively, an organization needs to have cybersecurity integrated into their overall growth strategy from day one. Security should not be a stand-alone function, but rather be integrated into the way an organization operates its business, develops its products, and utilize its infrastructure. When organizations implement secure-by-design principles, automated security controls, continuous monitoring, and strong identity management, they can scale without sacrificing their ability to innovate.
The rapid expansion of businesses creates both opportunity and danger to the business. Due to the increase in online activity, cyber threat actors become more organised, skilled, and difficult to control without a well-developed cyber security strategy.
When an organisation addresses its cyber security challenges in a proactive manner, and builds cyber security into each part of the organisation's processes, the organisation can grow in confidence while preserving its operational resilience to cyber attacks, and protecting its most important assets.
Ancrew Global Services helps fast-scaling businesses strengthen their cybersecurity posture through cloud security, identity management, threat monitoring, compliance support, and proactive risk assessments. Ancrew enables organizations to scale securely while reducing risk and improving visibility across modern digital environments.