CYBERSECURITY: THE LINCHPIN OF DIGITAL ENTERPRISE

Why is Managing Cybersecurity Crucial for Businesses?

As companies move towards digitization, the stakes for getting cybersecurity right are increasing. At the same time, it also disrupts the existing security practices for many companies moving out from a firewall perimeter and the overall business moving into a more agile way of conducting its business. Cyber security is a limiting factor to technological innovation and value creation for enterprises more than just a risk. In many ways, it becomes a strategic issue, causing further hurdles in customer relationships, the effectiveness of your organization, and your product capabilities. 

Simply developing structured processes will not help to get cybersecurity right, and people and technology will also play a role. What’s even more interesting to note is that cybersecurity is intertwined with technology evolutions at every level to deliver digital capabilities—for instance, Analytics, Robotic Process Automation, API Eco-systems, Agile Development, Public Cloud, and Enterprise Mobility. 

Let’s understand this better with an example. Consider an industry where data collection and analysis are crucial for value creation for a business, say retail. They collect customer data to understand customer needs and make the customer experience even more streamlined/delightful. As companies try to achieve this, building trust while handling massive data is highly important. Over 20% of customers would likely take their business elsewhere if they find out that the company is mishandling their data somehow. 

Here are some of the industries most impacted by digital transformation:

This blog covers the various aspects of cybersecurity risks, their role in digitalization, and how digital enterprises can take care of these issues.

The Risks of Cybersecurity and its Role in Digitalization

Each aspect of the digital enterprise has important cybersecurity implications. Enterprises need to build cybersecurity models and strategies directly into a company’s value chain. When building such a strategic system, they also need to support the next generation of enterprise-technology platforms, such as agile development, robotics, and cloud-based operating models. 

The Executive Director and Research Scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Laboratory for Manufacturing and Productivity) mentioned that the battle fought in moving faster than the decision cycle is making the slow-movers irrelevant from the leadership perspective. This further implies that cybersecurity is and should be at the center of each digital transformation strategy. Going forward, many companies would need to identify their vulnerable areas first and then connect the dots for value creation. 

Also, as companies adopt massive data analytics, Robotic Process Automation, and other process cloud technologies, they need to identify risks created by these data sets, which integrate multiple types of sensitive customer information. They must also incorporate security controls into analytics solutions that may not use a formal software development methodology.

Challenges with the Current System of Cybersecurity

CIOs or Chief Information Officers and their teams have consolidated cybersecurity-related activities into one or a few organizations. They have tried to identify different risks and compared them to various enterprise-wide risk appetites to understand gaps and make better decisions.

All these actions are necessary for an organization’s security. Without them, cybersecurity breaches would increase, thus resulting in the worst consequences for a business. After that, there has to be a strategy for needed actions, including implementation, architecture and design, code review, testing, and deployment. They must continue to maintain diligence in application security as they transition from waterfall to agile application development.

The core of Cybersecurity involves making crucial decisions about the kind of information risks an organization must accept and mitigate. Traditionally, CISOs have made cyber risk-management decisions using a combination of experience, intuition, judgment, and qualitative analysis. In the new era's digital enterprises, however, the number of assets and processes to protect, coupled with the decreasing practicality and efficacy of one-size-fits-all protection, have dramatically reduced the applicability of traditional decision-making processes and heuristics.

All in all, cyber security risks are a problem common to all institutions. With any complexity or sensitive arrangement, each company works on the strength of the network between their customers, suppliers, and other business partners. So, when it comes to Cybersecurity in digital transformation, we can say that everyone from the teams  must be aligned to add actual value! 

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