Security’s a hotbed of complexity – many different kinds of threats, technology that’s evolving all the time, and businesses can’t keep up. Changing standards and incredibly complicated threats make most non-technical buyers either throw the problem over the wall to their technology team (and miss out on the value of a business-led security approach) or their eyes glaze over at the mere mention of security and never really give it the attention it requires.
And what’s worse is that this complexity isn’t getting better, it’s getting worse. That’s why we all need to get over our apprehension, fear, boredom, and whatever else is keeping us from really understanding what we need to do in security. The best way to do that is to keep a business-value focus on it, making sure we learn what we need without digging too deep into the weeds and getting frustrated?
Bridge the divide between the highly complex and the need-to-know by focusing on three core, interrelated areas:
- Digital trust: Your ability to succeed in the digital environment requires that your trading partners (customers, suppliers, external stakeholders) trust you to be ethical, legally operating, and practicing up to date security procedures to protect their data and IP. If others start to doubt your ability to secure your own data or theirs, you are dead as a business. It’s pretty simple as a concept and amazingly complex when executing.
- OneOffice: Digitization and the renewed rise of customer-centricity mean that the wall between back office and front office has collapsed – everyone in a company is customer facing in this age where customers have significant visibility into our internal operations. That means your security policies, procedures, and risk approaches need to be brought up from the basement and shared across your entire organization.
- Shared responsibility: Security isn’t just something you worry about within your four walls anymore. As data and IP get shared across trading partners, the need for a shared view on securing digital assets becomes critical. Everyone in a trading network owes the other members a secure environment, so sharing accountability for security will become the new normal.
We started our security resolution early by publishing new research that defines the eight prerequisites of digital trust, including data integrity, business alignment, and device security, among others. And then we’ll be building on that by publishing our findings on how well service providers can help clients with managed security services for digital trust in February 2017.
Don’t be intimidated by security challenges, put them in the context of your business and make progress toward digital trust. Here’s to a secure, business-focused 2017!
Posted in : Security and Risk
