Forewarned is Forearmed: A Q&A With Greg Gatzke, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman, ZAG Technical Services

Produce moves pretty fast—if you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

This adapted quote is what colors my thoughts as I watch fresh news cycle rapidly from breaking headlines to the defunct. That pace, the propulsion that blends tomorrow into yesterday, tends to numb terrifying new terms like “ransomware” to a dull awareness. How can we concern ourselves with what might happen when already navigating solutions to what is happening?

In short, ours can be an industry too steeped in trees to see the forest—until it bears down on top of us.

Greg Gatzke, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of ZAG Technical Services, is the herald in the trees, warning us of what could rapidly transform today’s non-issue into tomorrow’s agent of chaos.

Because that is what happens when a company is under the siege of a security breach.

Melissa De Leon Chavez: We often read about cyber breaches in the news, and you have shared some specifically in ag with me, including a few cloud providers that ag companies rely on. Can you further explain why retailers, growers, and operators should be concerned?

Greg Gatzke, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman, ZAG Technical Services: Security vulnerabilities and the potential for breaches are significant concerns in the industry—assuming otherwise is both common and dangerous. Timekeeping, quality assurance, ERP, and any other systems dependent on cloud services are subject to data breaches. Not only are they at risk, but a breach can take these services down for a long time—sometimes for weeks, impacting companies’ abilities to pay employees, for example.

MDC: You successfully have my attention! So, any back-of-house businesses operating in technology are at risk. Are there any issues that might even be specific to fresh produce, making the industry more vulnerable?

GG: Time sensitivity, at retail especially, is what first comes to mind. We are fresh—delays create chaos in our industry. Ours is a high-speed, tech-dependent, low-cost structure, and we are at a particularly high-security risk as a result. Other industries with higher margins tend to have more to spend on security, whereas in produce, we have government regulations, the Produce Traceability Initiative, and more; everything has to be tracked and reported on.

We depend on technology to do all of this, but that is where it stops. Yet, if there was a breach that halted a business’ system, what could we do? Take, for example, CDK—a company of 15,000 car dealerships. What did it do when it was impacted by a breach? That company had to go to paper in order to accommodate its sales. Ag can’t necessarily go to paper, for traceability purposes, efficiency, and more. So we need to prepare for this.

MDC: What might such preparation look like, and how can ZAG Technical Services help?

GG: As we move to the cloud, the Internet becomes paramount and we need to think of all sorts of disasters. Companies should have two Internet connections in case one goes down—it is always better to have a backup for any business. It is also important to know what it looks like for your business if you could not access the cloud. What do you keep in the cloud that would be disrupted, and what would the potential recovery look like? Many businesses aren’t sure, and for that ZAG offers a Security Assessment, which shows them a score—similar to a credit score—for their security systems. The comprehensive assessment includes:

An executive report detailing cybersecurity preparedness status

A prioritized list of vulnerabilities that should be fixed

Reports that an internal IT team can use

Comprehensive pre- and post-remediation advice

MDC: In addition to security, are there advantages to know besides avoiding the disruptions associated with a breach or potential breach?

GG: Security is important because it keeps you running, but it’s also a competitive advantage. Customers stay with you when you don’t go down for days at a time because of tech delays. At the same time, criminals are going after PII (personally identifiable information), which can be a class action drain for companies, so getting ahead of that is important. Most key to our industry is knowing that fresh produce must always continue to move forward, and if your business’ disruption creates a gap in production, it will be a competitor who fills it. Most of us cannot afford to let that happen, and investing in tech security guarantees it is far less likely to.

It does not do justice to simply say that it’s too easy to forget a problem until it’s a catastrophe—a statement that implies a carelessness our industry does not have. Our attention and commitment to everything from transparency to quality control and food safety shows this is not the case.

As Greg poignantly observes, produce is in the unique position of being high risk while working to keep costs down, making a two-step recipe for security challenges. So, as we approach end-of-year discussions, now is the time to close that gap and bring the same rigor to our digital processes as we do to our physical ones.

Because the risks have stakes too high to gamble—especially for fresh produce.