In January I talked about new threats arising from the shift to truly digitally enabled services. Since then we have seen the catastrophic attack on Redcar and Cleveland BC. With an average of 800 cyber-attacks an hour on councils, leading to the complete failure of digital systems, the issue of cyber security now more than ever, needs to be on the management team agenda.

Simply trusting up to date virus protection and regular backups no longer means that we can recover quickly. With good design you can have greater resilience, but current technology won't stop an attack getting in. Generally, virus protection relies on someone else having been attacked and defeated; in fact, it takes around 10,000 organisations to be defeated before a defence is issued. The signature of the attack is sent out so that your virus protection can recognise it when it arrives. That's assuming that the virus is not polymorphic and doesn't change its signature as it attacks of course.