by T.J. Minichillo
[This is the fourth of a 4-part series about what it means to be truly resilient in the cyber security industry]
If your journey of 1,000 digital transformation miles begins with a single step, here’s step one: recognize that digital transformation isn’t just about technology. It’s about making business processes and workflows easier and faster in ways that boost productivity, growth and revenue.
To be the cyber hero along this journey takes guts. It takes foresight. And it requires new strategies for protecting one of the most critical business assets of all – data.
When COVID-19 engulfed the world last year, many organizations were forced to streamline operations, lower costs and rethink their IT strategies so that workflows among remote employees, customers and supply chains remained intact. At the same time, this highly distributed yet digitally interconnected environment introduced new, porous attack surfaces that sophisticated gangs of criminals were only too happy to exploit. When tools that were designed to keep data secure failed with catastrophic consequences for hundreds of enterprises and government agencies, the blame fell on technologists for relying on obsolete perimeter-protection strategies rather than viewing data-centric security as an essential driver of an organization’s ecosystem.
As anyone victimized by a data breach will attest, current approaches and tools for managing cybersecurity are broken. More Boards of Directors and CEOs are sleepless, worrying whether they’ve calibrated the right type and scale of security investment to safeguard data against a rising tide of criminal masterminds. They lean more heavily on their CIOs and CISOs to build and maintain what they hope are hack-proof capabilities, only to discover – often too late – that confidential business, customer, employee or supply-chain information has been exfiltrated and being sold to the highest bidder on the dark web, negotiated for ransom or exposed publicly to cause brand or reputational damage.
Leaders who make security decisions in a vacuum – without considering how data impacts overall business workflows, goals and revenue – are ultimately doomed to cybersecurity failure. Data is a fundamental business enabler and having a data-centric security strategy in place is essential for every business to succeed.
Ask yourself, how united is your data security strategy to the business outcomes that your board members and CEO expect? Does that strategy create value and a competitive advantage for your organization?
If not, reimagine a world where data is so intelligent that it thinks for itself, automatically self-protects against unauthorized access and reports on its whereabouts, everywhere and anywhere it goes, in near-real time. Show your leadership team how easily and affordably a data-centric strategy can be with intelligent, self-protecting data security technology that changes the entire cybersecurity paradigm.
Our world could use more cyber heroes. Will it be you?
Let’s start a one-on-one conversation about the data security issues blocking your roadway to successful business transformation. We can help clear those roadblocks.
If you enjoyed this blog post, please share it with your friends and colleagues on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter!
•••
T.J. Minichillo is Keyavi’s chief information security officer (CISO) and VP of cyber threat & intelligence. He is a nationally renowned cybersecurity and intelligence expert, helping to detect and thwart many of the world’s significant cyber threats. He has held strategic intelligence roles in financial services, the military and energy, including global head of threat intelligence at both National Grid and Morgan Stanley, deputy director at Citigroup’s Cyber Intelligence Center, chief cyber intelligence officer at Merrill Lynch, and senior intelligence special agent at the Department of Defense. Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn.
