The digital transformation wave has been reshaping industries in every part of the globe, though at varying speeds. Over the next several years, a convergence of pace is anticipated: By 2025, more than 50% of enterprise data, applications and infrastructure will be on the cloud. In addition to data hosting, it is predicted that over 90% of workforces, customers and partners will be transacting via mobile devices by the same year. This of course means that access to applications, data and transactions will be increasing across wired and wireless networks.
With the opportunity for new services, improved customer experience, heightened efficiency and increased profits, there is no doubt that digital is worth the investment despite security concerns. It is evident in industries such as financial services—one of the more vulnerable industries from a security standpoint—where digital transactions have risen to represent 65% of all transaction types globally, and in some countries as high as 98%.
However, it would be remiss to paint an entirely positive picture of the digital landscape with no mention of the security downside. It’s true: as attractive as going digital may be, there is an inherent risk involved that could potentially offset any gains. All it takes, after all, are the efforts of a single determined hacker to cause the irreparable loss of IP, business intel and customer data, potentially resulting in devastating financial loss and not to mention irreparable harm to the company’s brand.
Consider the following financial settlements between 2016 and 2019 following security breaches:
Company | Industry | Incident | Occurrence | Financial Settlement |
Equifax | Financial Services | Customer Data Breach | 2019 | $700m |
Capital One | Banking | Customer Data Breach | 2019 | $500m (est.) |
British Airways | Airlines | Customer Data Breach | 2018 | $230m |
Uber | Transportation | Customer Data Breach | 2018 | $148m |
Marriott | Hospitality | Customer Data Breach | 2016 | $124m |
These examples do not include incidentals paid by companies to hackers. Security incidents can occur in any industry. Hackers are not picky when it comes to choosing a target, with their top concerns being the size of the company and the value of the data. Once the target has been established, these digital pirates will use clever entry schemes to access and steal users’ personal identity and credit information in mass quantity. And if that was not enough, they may find the opportunity to scour deeper and usurp additional customer assets.
90% of companies are not ready for digital transformation
Security as a mandatory capability needs to be proactive and preventive to ensure an incident-proof business environment for stakeholders, e.g. regulators, customers, partners, suppliers, leadership and employees.
As Trasers data shows, most companies are neither ready to defend nor willing to take threats seriously enough to protect the assets of their clients and their own. As apparent as the risks and resulting financial damage may be, these naïve companies maintain a false sense of security based on the fact that they have yet to experience a data breach—as if the past had anything to do with the future.
There is no digital transformation without security
For too long, security has been playing a game of catch up, reacting to new concerns as they arise as opposed to anticipating the evolving climate with preemptive solutions. There are straightforward explanations for why this continued approach will lead to more disasters in the digital age. Hackers are highly motivated to steal given the lucrativeness of their spoils. They have also become sophisticated in their ability to hack through complex networks without making so much as a peep about their intentions on social media or in public forums. Clearly, staying a step ahead of the hackers is a challenge for even the smartest security experts.
The evolving digital landscape dictates that security must be a top imperative and that it must include a predictive posture that enables new functions as required by the business in real time. This even goes for organizations that have been historically well-prepared in terms of security risks—the adaptation needs to be ongoing, as complacency is a killer. Systems that have supported businesses for many years may become obsolete within the next two. That means, for a company to become digitally progressive, they must align at the top management level and invest capital in preventive measures rather than retro-fixes; they have to get a step ahead of the business models and enable them as opposed to limit, drive as opposed to follow, and energize as opposed to constrain.
A data-driven approach to upgrading security
Fortunately, there is nothing mysterious about how to achieve the above. The creation of a world-class enterprise security infrastructure can be accomplished today with a systematic, step-by-step approach that incorporates security threat-assessing architecture, and engineering models that build security into the process of applications and solution development.
Cycle of Security Enablement
Trasers provides data-driven insights on security threats, maturity across industries and companies, secure engineering models, architectures and tooling, monitoring, analytics and KPIs that can all be used to measure security success. CIOs and CISOs can also benchmark their maturity against Trasers data to understand their current level of maturity and develop their security roadmap with fact-based insights.
CEOs need to understand that no matter how fiercely competitive the future is shaping out to be, there can be no transformation without first ensuring security and providing a strong assurance to all internal and external stakeholders. Top management needs to align and provide their CIO or CISO organizations with fully adequate funds to enable them to do whatever is needed to ensure enterprise security. Companies that iterate rapidly through these cycles will join the elite club of digitally progressive industry leaders.