Cyber Security Strategy In The Digital Age

Despite recent higher levels of investment in advanced cyber security technologies less than 20% of organisations are effectively stopping cyber-attacks and fixing hacks.  CISOs must embrace the commercial realities facing their organisations in a disruptive marketplace. 

The security posture of a company is now just as important to the CEO as it is to the CISO, especially if that company handles data and is rolling out digital initiatives, which in the digital economy, is the vast majority.

Getting cyber security right is now the big question facing executive leadership and security teams alike and the rest of the business, from board level down, must ensure cyber security has a seat at the leadership table.

The shift is a shared responsibility: CISOs can and must, engage more collaboratively with the rest of the business, while boards, C-suites and other business functions must commit to a closer working relationship with their cyber security colleagues. Only in this way can cybersecurity teams play a crucial role as enablers of transformation.

According to Kelly Bissell, the global senior managing director of Accenture, 93% of companies are now “Internet companies,” meaning they work in digital and online spheres. “Our analysis identifies a group of standout organisations that appear to have cracked the code of cybersecurity when it comes to best practices.... Leaders in our survey are far quicker at detecting a breach, mobilising their response, minimising the damage and getting operations back to normal.” he said.

Organisations can no longer take a fully defensive or reactive approach to security, because the damage will have been done. Instead, organisations must be proactive.

To meet these increasingly stringent compliance requirements, organisations can’t take a compliance checkbox approach. Instead, a holistic, all-encompassing cyber security and data protection strategy is needed with a leader at the helm.

The Key Issues In Understanding Cyber Security

Leaders focused more of their budget allocations and on sustaining what they already have, whereas the IT non-leaders place significantly more emphasis on piloting and scaling new capabilities. Leaders once it is explained to them are more than three times as likely to provide users of security tools with required training for those tools.

Organisations need to think beyond securing just their own enterprises and take better steps to secure their vendor ecosystems.

Some of the most, high profile, breaches in the last few years suggests they can be even more detrimental than previously thought, particularly for publicly-traded companies. Record-breaking fines, plummeting share prices and sky high legal fees are, unfortunately, all par for the course. With stronger relationships at business and board level, a better understanding of the organisation’s commercial imperatives, and the ability to anticipate the evolving cyber threat, CISOs can become central to their organisations’ transformation. As the threats increase employee cyber security training is becoming very important.

For Information and Training recommendations for your type of company please contact Cyber Security Intelligence for a free consultation.

Accenture:       EY.com:     Accenture:      TEISS:     BitGlass:      Information-Age: 

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