I am a Cyber Security Associate with EY Ireland based in Dublin and joined EY 9 months ago from a previous background of customer service and malware analysis.

I work within the EMEIA Advisory Centre (EAC); a team within EY’s Advisory practice focused on service offerings and building selected capabilities in Digital, Analytics, Cyber Security, Governance, Risk and Compliance in key industry sectors.

Since joining EY I have worked on 3 client assignments, 2 in Ireland and my current assignment in Western Europe. Each time I have had the great fortune to work with some very big client names in the industry, all of which you would recognise immediately.

In each case I have worked with a team of EY consultants helping to build ‘A Better Working World’. But how do we do this?

As a team we first travel to the client’s premises and meet with the necessary teams and individuals for the areas within which they want to improve, in our case cyber security. We use a mixture of face to face interviews, workshops, conference calls (and later) presentations to understand their unique needs and challenges.

Since we have an outside view of the client’s organisation we can deliver a fresh perspective on the challenges they face while they work to meet the needs of their customers and shareholders in the best way they know how.

Using this perspective we can create more efficient business processes (ways of working) allowing their staff to work more effectively. They can then achieve more, often in less time. We also provide a series of prioritised recommendations to the client to improve their cyber security while still maintaining their existing budget. This allows them to obtain the maximum benefits for the least amount of spending in areas such as:

• The security of their computer networks
• How quickly and completely they can recover from physical disasters or other outages
• How they transfer information among their employees and how that information is stored securely
• How each server and workstation within the company is managed and hardened against attack

It is always humbling and gratifying to see how quickly our clients benefit from these improvements. These improvements are then passed on to their customers which, can often number more than 1 million.

It is using this approach that I proudly work within EY to build ‘A Better Working World.’

James Collins