Chief Marketing Officer
Each October, the US Department of Homeland Security observes National Cybersecurity Awareness Month, “a collaborative effort between government and industry to raise awareness about the importance of cybersecurity and to ensure that all Americans have the resources they need to be safer and more secure online.”
In today’s information era, data security is everyone’s responsibility. Whether you’re a small company delivering professional services to a local clientele, or an enterprise level multinational with locations around the world, cybersecurity must be top of mind. That’s because attackers can infiltrate your systems without your knowledge.
The threats come from all sides: encrypting data with ransomware, stealing sensitive data to sell it to criminals, or simply creating negative publicity for your company with a high-profile security breach. When you don’t even know if an attacker is inside your system, you could be giving attackers a huge head start in doing damage to your most precious assets: your data. Every company with data is at risk, with myriad of bad actors devising new ways to keep you from accessing your data. And with a majority of these breaches being financially motivated, the costs associated with a breach keep increasing. Ransomware continues to be a threat to companies of all sizes; according to the Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, it accounted for almost 24 percent of all malware attacks in 2018.
If your organization deals with data, you’re in the data security business.
With threats constantly evolving, it can be both time-consuming and complex to set up and monitor tools to protect your data from security threats. Without the resources to build out expensive, specialized teams that can stand up security solutions, maintain them, and update them regularly, you could find your organization vulnerable to attacks. Even if you have the financial resources, you may not have the expertise in-house to stand up a robust security operation. Knowing how to deploy a robust solution to both solve for potential threats and anticipate future attacks is no longer a luxury. In fact, in today’s environment, you need to assume that there is currently an adversary with malicious intent with a foothold in your environment. Your responsibility is to find and eradicate that foothold before they cause damage. It’s critical to be able to identify threats, remediate before any damage is done, and recover quickly if damage is done in order for your organization to survive and thrive.
Time is on the attackers’ side
While some threat vectors can be deployed quickly and do immediate damage, most attacks take a lot of time. Malicious actors can gain access to your system without leaving a trail of evidence. The longer the time between a security breach and the discovery of that breach, the more time you’ve given the hackers to do damage to your business. Time is almost always on the adversaries’ side. Monitoring your logs isn’t enough to catch sophisticated cyberattacks. Hackers are very good at covering their trails. It’s critical for you to monitor your network flows and continuously test your configurations. That can take enormous time and resources. Just by requiring you to spend so much valuable time monitoring your network, the cybercriminals are already winning. The time demanded of your company leaders to address data security is time that can’t be spent on your core business. And yet, business leaders have been slow to adapt. A 2018 Deloitte survey of over 1,400 CIOs across 23 industries revealed that only around half are proactively treating security as a strategic imperative, when preventing a breach with a proactive strategy could mean the difference between staying in business—or being shut down by an attack.
Embrace security as a strategy for end-to-end digital resilience
No longer are organizations talking solely about cybersecurity. Digital resilience is the new standard. Attackers don’t break down doors anymore. Instead, they sneak in and hide, biding their time until they find a weakness or compromise they can exploit. With the advent of cloud-based data storage, there is no longer a physical “edge” or boundary to protect with a firewall. Users and data are everywhere, and it’s often unclear where the next threat could be coming from, or how to defend your organization against it.
Digital Resilience…
- Is a strategic posture that allows your organization to evolve and grow as threat vectors multiply.
- Gives your organization a complete picture of your risks and your organization’s approach to identify and counter those risks.
- Allows you to meet today’s security challenges and to pivot as threat vectors evolve.
Digital resilience isn’t about adding complexity to your environment. Rather, it is about being able to recover and continue to operate in the midst of an attack, whether that attack is driven by malicious actors, market forces, or simply Mother Nature. You must be able to conduct business, even when under attack, in order to stay competitive in your market.
To learn how to survive and thrive in an era of constant cyber threat, check out our ebook “Cyber Defense in a New Era.”
