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Cyber Security Drawing Attention of CEOs, Boardrooms

Cyber Security Drawing Attention of CEOs Boardrooms

Cyber Security Drawing Attention of CEOs BoardroomsIBM’s online information security publication, Security Intelligence, has a new survey from FTI Consulting titled “Law in the Boardroom in 2014,” which surveyed 500 board members and general counsel and has “found that cyber security threats have taken over the top spot in the lists of worries.”

Finally. Previously seen as for the attention of security specialists, the widespread concern on the top floor of the building, while new, should make a lot of sense and is frankly quite overdue. Why? Simple, really, when you consider the immense, potentially company existence-threatening costs imposed by security breaches:

Regulators, the media, customers and markets all show scant mercy to organizations that have suffered major security breaches, especially if consumers’ sensitive data has been exposed. The FTI study cites the Ponemon Institute’s estimate that the average cost of security breaches went up 30 percent in the past year alone.

While unfortunate that it took this long for the boardroom to get it, the benefits of CXO attention can be huge. Boardroom attention assists greatly in “building a framework with better security.” Even better is that the same attention helps ensure that security is built into the system architecture. As security experts Erik van Ommeren, Martin Borrett and Marinus Kuivenhoven put it in their e-book, companies need:

“to consider security as an essential element of how products and services are designed and delivered, how business processes within an organization are structured and how both customer and confidential data and information are stored and protected.”

But what about all your current systems, you ask? According to the article, “after all, enterprises must work with systems that already exist.” Are they doomed to be continually breached by joyful black hats? Not so, says IBM/Security Intelligence: “these systems are in constant development, and the practical goal is to improve security with all-new builds and upgrades, gradually bringing the security of the whole system to a higher level.”

To conclude, I’ll leave you with this from the end of the article: “This makes now the ideal moment to take charge in building the secure networks of trust that enterprises need to thrive in the information age.”

In other words, maybe now is a good time to invest an IAM Solution.

For the article from Security Intelligence, click here.

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