EP373: Spotlight - Jamie Beresford - Understanding The Future Of Cyber Safety

Guest: Generally, the average time that a criminal is in a mailbox will be 6 weeks before they will launch a campaign to mimic you in a conversation and try and trick either one of your team members or one of your clients into inadvertently transferring money. You're listening to The Successful Bookkeeper with your host, Michael Palmer. Listen each week as inspiring guests share their secrets of success to help you increase your confidence, work smarter, and build a business you love. This episode of The Successful Bookkeeper is brought to you by PureBookkeeping.com, the proven system to grow your bookkeeping business. Welcome back. Welcome back to the Successful Bookkeeper Podcast. I'm your host, Louie Prosperi. Our guest is the CEO of Practice Protect, Jamie Beresford. Welcome to the show. I am very excited to have you on as one of the key topics that I'm very interested in is in cybersecurity and protecting data. And I would love to know how you got into it and a little bit more about your company. Sure. Great to be here, Louie. Quick on the back of Scaling New Heights. So it's good to have got this opportunity with you. Look, we started back in 2015 and our mission, I guess, was to take the same tools and controls that the Big Four and what large firms were doing to protect themselves in the growing threat around cybersecurity and take that to the SMB space. And ever since then, it's really been a game of cat and mouse, but we've had this specialized cold face experience. We only work with bookkeeping and accounting firms. And as criminal tactics, I guess, have evolved, it's been this game of cat and mouse where we've used that experience to continually stay ahead of these evolving trends and make sure that our product stack keeps pace with not only the way tactics have evolved, but also how rapidly accounting technology has moved through that period of time.

So that's interesting because the old days, And I'm not saying like long time ago, we're probably talking 5 or 7 years ago, the technology that accounts and bookkeepers were using wasn't as rapidly moving as it is now with cloud and app-based and all of their different interconnections. How has that made this more difficult or how has that complicated the situation? And what should accounts and bookkeepers be looking for since they're definitely going into a cloud-based system? Yeah, look, specifically to cloud, I think the first thing to tackle is access. I think when a lot of people think about