Wednesday November 14, 2018 saw County’s Out in the Field Data Insurance and Cyber Crime expert Oliver Burns speak at the Orion Farming Group’s ‘Making tax digital’ event.
50 farmers were in attendance as guest speakers from FarmPlan and Nockels Gee also spoke about the need to report tax digitally from 2019. County’s presentation was on digital liability and cyber crime; emergent issues for farmers.
Regarding the event, Oliver said: “Farmers are facing challenges on my fronts going into next year but the digital landscape is no longer a horizon issue. Data is an asset, it will be more exposed and farmers deserve to protect something that has intrinsic value to their business.”
Attendees were treated to bacon rolls and hot drinks at the start followed by morning pastries after the presentations.
Tweet highlights and pictures from the day include:
Many thanks to Oliver Cook from @County_Farm for updating us about cyber security & keeping personal data safe online… @orionfg @FarmplanUK #makingtaxdigital pic.twitter.com/3ODkBCPgtn
— Orion Farming Group (@orionfg) November 14, 2018
Over half of all crime in the UK in 2016 was from cyber sources, including hacking, social engineering and system compromise. As County discussed, even farmers who have basic IT systems are still vulnerable from a number of sources to data breaches and hacks.
Tim Sydenham, Director at County and a keen data protection advocate, said: “As a business we handle a high amount of data and are aware of the need to protect this asset. For our farming clients we’re recommending they take a few minutes to assess their data hotspots and start to see data not just as dots and digits on screens”.
To find out more about data liability and cyber crime, you can find a handy A4 guide here