*By Cleber Ribas,
As Digital Transformation and connectivity advance, more companies are moving towards more flexible, decentralized and mobile models. As a result, information management has become an essential and equally challenging demand for organizations. After all, another effect of accelerating digitization is increased cyber risks and threats. Today, as they say, it is no longer a matter of knowing whether or not a company will be attacked. On the contrary, it only remains to be seen when, how and how many times it will be targeted by cybercriminals.
In this scenario, a very important concept is that of cyber resilience, which assesses the ability of a company to contain, control, react and overcome attacks. However, while resiliency is indeed a must for modern organizations, it must be clear that the ability to withstand and react to attacks is not enough. It is necessary to go further.
In addition to resilience, leaders should also value the formation of a culture of constant learning, with adequate infrastructure, tools, support and knowledge to help their operations to follow journeys of continuous evolution and care for cybersecurity. That is: more than implementing barriers, it is necessary to monitor what happens and learn – relying, of course, on solutions capable of offering real control and protection in the face of existing threats.
Of course, a key condition for building such an environment is the need to balance business objectives and risks. Not coincidentally, a recent Gartner survey highlighted that 88% of the boards of directors of the largest global companies already consider cybersecurity as a business risk and not just an IT technical issue.
Another study, this time by the Accenture consultancy, also reinforces this scenario. According to the survey, 85% of Chief Information and Security Officers (CISOs) agree that the digital security strategy needs to be developed and adjusted from the business objectives of the organization as a whole. On the other hand, 81% of the leaders heard in the study also declared that “staying ahead of the invaders is a constant battle with an unsustainable cost”.
In fact, combining business goals and digital security strategies can be quite challenging, as the dynamics of scams and attacks change radically very quickly. Identifying a possible new threat, looking at all activities and records, is humanly impossible, even more so given the serious shortage of professionals that companies face in Brazil and worldwide.
To combine these two sides, leaders are increasingly being asked to invest in redesigning protection strategies, with tools and partners that understand the realities of the teams and, at the same time, that also help to ensure an operation that is better prepared to deal with with virtual risks. The smarter the combination of technology and processes, the better the resilience and development capacity of companies as a whole.
Therefore, it is vital that leaders reinforce their cybersecurity strategies by investing in solutions that guarantee safe, anywhere access for their employees to their companies' internal networks (through next-generation VPNs), as well as implementing systems unified threat management. Having hardware and software infrastructure that is always up-to-date is what will help maximize the performance of a security strategy in these new times.
There is no doubt that creating a resilient environment is a challenging task. In this redesign, leaders must consider the maximum number of points that help to simplify the work – checking from the support tools, with personalized service, to the updating of network and content control solutions made in a way dedicated to the operation market. Only with this thought in mind can organizations develop projects that are, at the same time, flexible and strong to sustain operations for today and for the future.
*Cleber Ribas, CEO of Blockbit
Notice: The opinion presented in this article is the responsibility of its author and not of ABES - Brazilian Association of Software Companies
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