3 reasons to integrate cybersecurity into digital strategies

As digital transformation plans accelerate around the world, digital resilience has never been more vital. From the ability to sustain commercial operations despite unexpected events to recovering rapidly from catastrophic equipment failures, digital resilience is a linchpin for businesses across practically every industry sector today.

A key pillar to digital resilience is none other than cybersecurity. Cyber adversaries are increasingly sophisticated and range from well-resourced state-sponsored hackers, professional hacking groups for hire, to numerous hackers using widely available commercial malware kits. The result is a far larger pool of cyber aggressors who can do more damage than before.

Crucially, their primary motive now revolves around exacting commercial gains or privileged access for their efforts. The result is an evolved cyber threat landscape that is no longer about simplistic computer viruses but tailored malware and advanced persistent threats. Together with the rise of opportunistic phishing campaigns to snare the unwary, and the result is a perfect storm that most businesses find hard to defend against.

In the meantime, ongoing digital transformation initiatives translate to a much larger attack surface, while extensive digitalisation means that even minor digital footholds can be exploited to compromise other systems elsewhere within the organisation. Finally, as the value of the analytical insights become increasingly vital to enterprise survival in our data-driven world, protecting them is now more important than ever.

Here are three distinct reasons why enterprises must enhance their cybersecurity to strengthen their digital resilience.

- Cyber breaches can result in downtime

While cyber breachers had always been disruptive, the impact has grown substantially with digitisation. Last year, fitness-tracker company Garmin saw its systems go down after a cyberattack that saw data from some of its systems encrypted by ransomware¹. The cloud-centric nature of its services culminated in a multi-day, global outage that affected millions of users, including customer support functions such as company communications and website functions.

- The possibility of significant financial losses

Aside from a loss of brand reputation, the direct financial impact of a successful cyberattack can be significant. This ranges from the cost of remediation, emergency access to cyber experts to identify the source and extent of the breach, as well as regulatory fines should customer data be inadvertently leaked. In Singapore, companies have been fined tens of thousands of dollars by the Personal Data Protection Commission (PDPC) for data protection lapses².

- Being prepared is a vital part of digital resilience

Organisations know that it is not a matter of whether cyberattacks will happen, but when they will take place. Digital resilience calls for businesses to be prepared, which in the case of cybersecurity calls for the drawing up of incident-response plans that are regularly put to the test as part of simulated cyberattacks.

To be clear, enterprises are not resting on their laurels. But traditional cybersecurity programs built on formal processes of covering “the basics” are not adequate to stem increasingly sophisticated cyber threats. Savvy organisations are turning to their data, analytics, and AI, as the foundation to provide insights into different dimensional threats across the business and to prioritise the urgent and important.

Businesses must also accelerate the pace of innovation with new investments to stay ahead, according to analyst firm IDC. This entails moving away from investing in limited remedial fixes to focusing on advanced capabilities that can help them survive and thrive during future cyber crises³. This might include initiatives such as adopting a Zero Trust security framework, software-defined networking with route monitoring to protect communication links, and enterprise-wide data management to support business processes and stakeholders.

Digital resiliency is a business imperative, and cybersecurity is a key anchor of it. However, cybersecurity threats are growing and show no signs of abating. Given that not all businesses have the requisite in-house expertise and experience to fully protect themselves, the onus is on them to seek the right cybersecurity partner who can help them with protecting their systems and valuable information – without slowing down operations.

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¹ BBC, Garmin begins recovery from ransomware attack, Jul 2020.

² The Straits Times, Singapore firms fined $75,000 for personal data lapses affecting over 600,000 people, Jun 2021.

³ IDC, IDC Reveals Analytics and AI’s Role in Digital Resiliency, Jun 2021.