Firm Security
CEO Denny Schleper, along with CLA leadership, is stepping forward to educate the firm and improve the overall quality of security awareness across the CLA family. Listen to the podcast and hear where we are now and where we want to be in this new era of security awareness.
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Transcript
CEO Denny Schleper, along with CLA leadership, is stepping forward to educate the firm and improve the overall quality of security awareness across the CLA family. Listen to the podcast and hear where we are now and where we want to be in this new era of security awareness.
[00:00:03]
Narrator: Welcome to “Own The Promise,” a CLA podcast created to share what guides every decision we make and every relationship we cultivate.
[00:00:16]
Denny: Good morning, CLA family. This is Denny coming to you really in the middle of our promise season. I hope everyone has had a chance to embrace the promise season at a personal level. Obviously, the promise season, as we’ve indicated, is really all about gratitude and service, not only to one another but to our clients, so I hope we’re off to really a great promise season across the firm.
We did have an opportunity in the last week or so to conclude the Promise Leadership Series. This is a series, if you’re not familiar with it, that we have around 40 individuals who select to spend a good portion of their summer going through this series, understanding more about leadership within the firm, understanding more about the skillsets that are needed for leadership across the firm, and really an opportunity also to engage themselves into small groups and work on some very important and specific projects around CLA.
[00:01:23]
If you know any of these individuals, please congratulate them for an incredible summer experience that they had, and also some tremendous work that they accomplished. I know this because I sat in on the final presentation of these projects, and it was incredibly impressive what they all came up with to address some major issues across the firm.
[00:01:48]
You will hear more about these changes and various projects that they worked on. One, however, that after the presentation left me with a task, and that was around really the security issues in the firm. They really presented this as ‘protecting this house’, protecting the CLA house, and they came up with many great ideas that we will be implementing as we go forward to really increase the overall awareness of security in the firm.
I know many of you listening to this probably have a high level of awareness. However, as a CLA firm, CLA family, our awareness of the security issues are really not where it needs to be.
[00:02:41]
It needs to be elevated, and so one of the tasks that I committed, and I know Hod Dahl as the chief quality officer, also committed to, and that was really to heighten the awareness in every opportunity that we have, and if I could put it into this perspective for you, if you look at the way we address quality in the firm, in everything we do, I believe we’ve elevated the quality.
[00:03:10]
We see that just simply by the results. That same elevation of quality we have to match with the elevation of our security issues; how we take care of our physical environment around us with important information, secure information; how we deal with our own personal computers; the security of those computers.
We’ve had quite a number of what we call lost computers. Now, some of those may be stolen; others are simply misplaced and lost. That’s not taking care of the physical security that’s really afforded to all of us and the responsibility of all of us, and as you know, it goes far beyond the physical security. It goes into the phishing campaigns that you see constantly bombarding us in our daily lives and the test phishing that CLA does with our security group.
[00:04:15]
We have found that there is an incredible amount of us that are still clicking through the phishing emails and not understanding that that is a major responsibility of all of us, to make sure that that does not happen. One of the statistics given during the PLS project was that of all the breaches that occur, 91 percent of them start through emails–91 percent.
[00:04:44]
And so we all have to elevate our awareness to the fact that every time we’re operating our email, there are security issues that we need to be aware of. JP Reynolds, if you have not had a chance to meet him, was hired a few months ago, really as this director within the firm to spend each and every one of his days trying to improve and elevate the security within CLA.
[00:05:13]
Now, one of the things we had an opportunity to do was to have JP and Steve Noble present to our board of directors, and one of the questions asked was, “When you came to CLA from your previous experiences, how would you rate CLA’s overall security?” The rating actually was fairly positive; however, the biggest criticism for improvement, and I will say criticism, was really around this awareness.
[00:05:42]
While we had a lot of things put into place, the overall awareness within CLA is not where it needs to be, and so I’m coming to you today to just try to elevate that for all of us in everything that we do. There’s places in the firm, and many places in the firm, that are still using thumb drives and unsecured thumb drives. That is strictly prohibited, yet we experience that throughout the firm.
[00:06:17]
We’re going to be putting things in place that clearly eliminate that. But the biggest reason I’m having this discussion hopefully with all of us is to not only increase the awareness but to understand that firm leadership is going to take this more seriously, and that is, if you put yourself in a perspective where we are having quality issues — going back to the quality — we will clearly, as you know, take steps to change that, and those steps sometimes are education, but many times, there also has to be other changes made, because we cannot accept poor quality.
[00:06:59]
We have to look at that perspective the same as security. If we have areas in the firm that continue to cause security issues within the firm, we are going to probably start with education, but clearly, if it’s not taken care of, we need to make other changes to make sure that those security issues no longer exist within the firm.
[00:07:25]
You know we live in an era, obviously, of great concern, and I know most of you understand this risk, but as I mentioned up front, as a firm, we don’t really understand it, and so many results give us evidence of that, so we are going to probably have certain decals that may or may not — we’re going to decide on this — go on our computers, just as a daily reminder of that awareness, and other types of educational programs are going to be built into our whole L&D process to make sure that people that join us, out of school or from the outside with experience, that they clearly understand this awareness of security.
[00:08:11]
The great news that is look at what we’ve done with the quality of the firm. Let’s raise that security to the same level, and this really does start with personal accountability, and we all know what accountability is, so I would ask all of you to really commit to the firm, so you’re going to do what hopefully you say you’re going to do, and that is your part in making sure that you elevate your security awareness, and if you ever have any questions or concerns about security within the firm, make sure you bring that either directly to JP or directly to one of your leaders.
[00:08:54]
This is actually something that we’re trying to do from a position of strength, fortunately, not a position of weakness, and that’s a better starting point, so again, I implore all of you, let’s do this.
I will commit to you personally to do my part in this. So thank you again, CLA family, for everything you do. I know this is another item that we all have to hold ourselves accountable to, but it is the world forcing us to do this as well, and again, I think all of us understand that. CLA family, have a wonderful rest of the promise season until I come to you again next month. Thank you.
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Denny is the chief executive officer of CLA. As he goes about his duties related to the oversight of CLA’s direction, operations, expansion, and strategy, he is also an enthusiastic ambassador for the CLA Promise. He is fully committed to the firm’s position as a professional services firm that delivers integrated wealth advisory, outsourcing, and audit, tax, and consulting capabilities to help our clients succeed professionally and personally.
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