Your business is unique. No other business is the exact same size in the exact same market offering the exact same value proposition with the exact same people. Even if you operate a franchise, you’re bringing your own unique management style to it. That’s why franchise operators all achieve different business results—and why franchisors constantly monitor their franchisees to track their relative performance.
Uniqueness in business is, of course, a plus. We call it “competitive differentiation.” But uniqueness can be a problem when it comes to security and compliance. After all, you don’t want to spend your money re-inventing the security and compliance wheels. And you can’t afford the trial-and-error that’s inherent in wheel re-invention when you’re trying to achieve your critical security and compliance objectives.
So how do you balance the uniqueness of your business with the fact that you need to achieve security and compliance as quickly, reliably, and cost-efficiently as possible?
Well, here are three ideas you may find helpful:
Idea #1: Different in the same ways
First, it’s helpful to understand the specific attributes that make your business unique. One of the most distinctive attributes of any business, for example, is its vertical market. A law firm is not a consumer products company is not a university is not an industrial materials company.
Other attributes that differentiate one company from another are size, geographic reach, B2B vs. B2C, product vs. service (or some combination thereof), upmarket vs. downmarket, and low margin vs. high margin.
There are also differentiating attributes that are specific to your security and compliance requirements. Those attributes include your vertical market (which determine the nature of your compliance requirements), your digital footprint (how much technology you use and how it’s architected), the degree to which your employees work remotely (whether it’s because their jobs requirement them to be on the road or because you use liberal work-from-home policies to attract talent from all over), and your overall appetite for business risk.
Here's the thing though: While collectively these attributes make your business unique, individually they are attributes you share with other companies.
It’s just like how we are as people. You are absolutely a unique person. But there are people who are just like you in each of your various particulars. There are people who are as smart as you are, people who enjoy the same kinds of music, people who are also lactose-intolerant, etc. What makes you unique is how all those attributes come together in one person.
This understanding of uniqueness as a combination of individually non-unique attributes can be the first step in helping you craft a strategy that’s unique to your business without requiring a totally unique one-off re-invention of the wheel.
Idea #2: The same in different ways
Once you get a good grasp on Idea #1, you can apply Idea #2: Each of your business’s individual attributes—your vertical market, your degree of remote access, the rigor with which your IT team may or may not have configured your Microsoft365 environment—map to measures you need to take to ensure your security and compliance.
So while your company’s overall plans for security and compliance must be tailored to its unique needs, that tailoring is really just a matter of putting together precisely the right combination of elements commonly found in any security and/or compliance plan.
Again, consider the metaphor of a person. It would be upsetting if after examining you your doctor said “I’ve never seen anything like this in my life! We have to develop a whole new medication for you—and invent a whole new type of surgery!”
Instead, your expectation is that your doctor will help you as an individual by applying lessons already learned by the medical profession generally. And that’s a great way to approach security and compliance as well.
Idea #3: Get tested
This brings us to Idea #3. None of us should act as our own doctor. Even doctors go to a doctor.
The same holds true for your business. When it comes to security and compliance, you can’t determine your unique needs yourself. The best way to determine your business’s specific, unique needs for better security and more confident compliance is to get tested by an independent security-and-compliance testing specialist.
Sure, there’s a lot you already know about what makes your business unique. But there are things that you simply cannot know until someone else administers a test using a proven testing methodology.
So if you really want to know what makes your business unique, get tested. Then use the results of that test to devise a plan for your security and compliance that’s truly unique—and truly based on your business’s unique needs.
