Digital transformation is a regular business reality. Where market forces and changes in business models used to evolve over decades, now companies must continually address what they do and how they operate to remain competitive. This requires organisations to innovate and embrace new technologies and ways of working.
The risks and challenges that come with digital transformation must not be overlooked. Many large organisations still have legacy systems that are decades old, which means changing and, importantly, securing them is no trivial effort.
Augmenting these proven capabilities with market-leading businesses tools, such as advanced analytics, automation and artificial intelligence, can introduce significant risks that companies are not prepared for. Many industries have seen complete disruption in the way they operate and in their level of technology reliance, with the pace of change set to continue.
The prospect of managing this change and tackling new and unknown threats can cause some risk-adverse companies to defer from embracing technology transformation altogether. According to Cybersecurity Ventures, cybercrime damages will cost the world $6 trillion annually by 2021, up from $3 trillion in 2015.
While such caution may limit their exposure to cyber threats in the short term, the long-term damage from having failed to adapt the business for the digital age could potentially prove fatal. Companies must undoubtedly transform, but learn do so in a secure way.
“Nothing quite vaporises enterprise value as quickly as a cyber incident,” says Richard Hanlon, chief commercial officer, Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), at Aon’s Cyber Solutions. “As companies go through these transformations, greater cyber resilience isn’t going to be achieved solely through technology, governance or compliance. They have to look at it as an iterative process with no straight line or singular approach and adopt a holistic view to cyber risk management.
“Many organisations, of course, want to insure the risk to get it off their balance sheet, but don’t take a step back to ensure they’ve adequately assessed their risks, vulnerabilities and put appropriate programmes in place.
“This is a process issue and data becomes key. A more holistic approach recognises there is a valuable data ecosystem available within the various assessments, risk quantifications and responses to cyber incidents. The more organisations leverage those insights to dynamically assess the threat and, importantly, do something about it, the more cyber resilient they become.”
Cyber risks are inescapable. No organisation will ever be able to eradicate cyber threats or remove the risk of reputational damage should an incident occur. For those organisations that recognise increasing their security is part of an ongoing and iterative process, management of this risk does become achievable.
Aon partners with companies throughout this journey and can engage at any given touch point, whether that is assessment, quantification, insurance or incident response. This works best when companies are active participants in managing risk and engaged in a greater ecosystem of continuous review, improvement and investment in cyber risk management. Aon refer to this as the “Cyber Loop”.
Given this rate of change and the scale of increased threat, many organisations are unsure of whether they are doing enough, too much or taking the wrong approach entirely. Clearly, tackling this challenge is unique to each environment, but every company must first accept the risk exists and that it cannot be dealt with through any single measure.
Once organisations have gained an understanding of their cyber risk, they can start to manage it. This is achieved through building a robust cybersecurity programme, which includes developing the right polices and processes, deploying the right tools and aligning all the capabilities that form part of their efforts to protect against the risk.
