These are challenging times to run a business. From SMBs up to the largest enterprises, no organization has been untouched by profound changes in the global economy. In a world characterized by geopolitical and economic uncertainty, everyone is looking to make the right decisions for sustainable growth. More often than not, these plans are built on digital transformation initiatives. But all they promise can turn to naught if projects aren’t built on solid foundations.
This is why cybersecurity is increasingly viewed as a business enabler and driver of growth. Unfortunately, many boards still don’t see it that way. Research from earlier this year found that half (48%) of business leaders believe cyber’s value is limited to threat prevention. In fact, it is much more important than that.
How cyber-threats can impact growth
As organizations expand their investments in cloud apps, infrastructure and platforms, hybrid working, mobile computing, connected devices, AI and data analytics, they also invite new risks. By expanding the corporate attack surface in this way, they’re opening the door to potential compromise. The fact that many systems are secured only with a static password means hackers need not expend much effort to breach corporate perimeter, if it exists at all.
Their efforts are more likely to be successful today than at any time in the past. Why? Because cybercrime underground sites provide a readymade supply chain for attack tools, knowledge and easy-to-use services, which have lowered the barrier to entry for cyber-attacks. And on the defender side, IT security teams are crippled by skills shortages and the need to manage poorly performing point solutions. The global shortfall in industry professionals is now 3.4 million.
Serious breaches are more likely today, and they’re also having a major impact on operations and overall business growth efforts. Ransomware is the obvious example—whether an organization is forced offline because its systems are encrypted or because it fears they will be, this can often lead to substantial losses and disruption. But it may be surprising to hear that data breaches can have a similarly serious impact.
These too may require systems to be taken offline to investigate, quarantine and remediate. All of this works costs money, and redirects resources and staff away from important IT modernization projects. If the breach is deemed serious enough from a regulatory point of view, an entire digital transformation project may be shelved as a result. The impact can be even worse in some sectors. One study from 2019 found that data breaches at US hospitals increased the 30-day mortality rate for heart attacks and continued to elevate their number for around three years after the initial incident.
Why data-centric security?
From a sustainable growth perspective, therefore, breaches can have a serious impact. That makes it even more important to consider data-centric security. The model advocated by comforte requires tooling that automatically discovers and classifies data wherever it is in the organization, before applying strong protection to it. Crucially, comforte’s Data Security Platform offers format-preserving encryption and tokenization; the latter enable organizations to use the data for analytics and other sustainable growth use cases without compromising on security.
A recent Forrester analysis of comforte revealed that our platform could save $5.4m in losses by rendering data unreadable to hackers—one of many benefits which could help to support and protect growth plans.
