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It is important that you understand what your current security situation is. This is the bedrock for everything else you do, however, unfortunately most organisations seem to have difficulty pinning down where their security strengths and weaknesses lie.

Often the problem is one of working out where to begin. While you can work outside in, or inside out, working out how to group things into manageable chunks can still be daunting. Sometimes, this causes enough inertia that you never quite get round to assessing your baseline security – which means you never really know if your risk management is working, if your security controls work, if any security improvements are needed and so on.

To try and help combat this problem, added a new document to our free downloadable resources section. Titled “Business Security – Rapid Security and Safety Review,” this checklist is designed to enable you to run through a series of 15 simple questions to get a very high level feel of your overall security situation.

The process is simple and should take you less than a few minutes to complete the review. Simply look at each question and decide if you can answer yes or no. For any you arent sure about, then mark “dont know” and if they dont apply to you, you can leave them blank (or tick “yes”).

Once you are done, look back over the list. This is where the hard work may begin.

If you have any “dont know” answers, then we suggest that you start with those areas and see if you can find out what the situation is. It is important that you investigate these and try to avoid guessing at any answers.

The next step is to review any questions you answered “no” to. These are very high level areas to be considered for security and safety so it is best practice to have implemented all which apply. You can use the list of “no” answers as a start point for your security improvement plan.

There may be some occasions, although it must be avoided wherever possible, where you have a sound business reason to not implement anything in one or more of the security & safety areas on the checklist. If this is the case, then make sure you properly document (in the risk register as well as keeping a record of decisions) the reasons for this security failure and any short, medium or long term plans to improve things.

Lastly, you have the “yes” answers. Ideally, all your answers will be a yes – in which case, give yourself a pat on the back. However, this is still only the start point of the long journey.

Once you are happy you can answer yes to every question, it is time to look into verifying those answers – for example, how do you know the doors and windows are locked? How well trained is your security team? – and carrying out a more in-depth security assessment. Sadly, this is outside the scope of a generic download document and would need to carried out by trained security professionals.

It can be a long road to becoming a secure organisation, but by using tools like the Rapid Security Review checklist you can start on the journey, and getting the advice of high quality security consultants will make the process much faster.

Whatever your organisation, whatever your circumstances – don’t delay your security. Act now, rather than after something bad happens.