Think about every conversation taking place with the stakeholders in your company. The driving factor of any decision within a business, whether it relates to public relations, social media, or boosting sales with new platforms, relates back to how this investment will result in a positive financial return for the company in the short and long run.
For any organizational leader and decision-maker, cyber security incurs high costs in a way that a CRM system does not – new sales platforms directly bring increased profits to the company whereas cyber security doesn’t directly correlate with revenue. It’s these challenging conversations that have left IT departments around the world attempting to stay in front of the risk of inadequate cyber security. Cyber security is an ever-evolving field. Ill-intentioned people are becoming ever more skilled at exploiting dated cyber security measures and methods. The most challenging part of cyber security is that it’s impossible to know that yours isn’t up to par until it’s too late.
IT departments need to adapt the way in which they market their security and privacy methods internally to stakeholders. The traditional approach of marketing enhanced cyber security as digital insurance against hackers or security breaches is no longer convincing enough in a time when cyber attacks have become highly variable, increasingly frequent, and more destructive to companies’ day to day activities. When marketing cyber security, it has to be made clear that this portion of a business’s budget is no longer an end-of-line expense but rather an essential piece to access effective security systems and high priority for not only the IT department but the business strategy as a whole in confronting cyber threats.
In short, businesses need to return to the basics by establishing a culture of cyber security in which “security first” thinking is the basis of all decisions and policies adopted or adapted. One of the key shifts in business and cyber security relates to the massive move toward cloud migration and cloud-based solutions for data analysis. Beyond the surface level changes in data storage, architecture and application usage, the additional and often ignored change when it comes to data breaches is related to cybersecurity.
A large number of digital security tools and cyber security policies were developed and implemented at a time when a much greater amount of company data was stored and analyzed on-site. These traditional and dated digital security models aren’t enough as workloads are migrated to the cloud. If your company has made the move to the cloud, the time for your company to rethink its cyber security policies from the ground up is long overdue.