How Intelligent Security Automation Can Relieve Your Board Directors' Biggest Security Pains

It’s tempting to view cybersecurity through a purely technical lens, as a set of purely technical problems to solve. From that angle, the chances of repelling an attack — whether it’s based on sophistication or brute force — would depend entirely on the technology at the defending team’s disposal. In that kind of road race, whoever has the fastest car would win.

Unfortunately, the real world doesn’t work like that. Drivers win races — though not without the right car and pit crew. While the technology definitely matters, races are won by drivers and teams making split-second decisions based on the best information and applying their best judgment. Any reliable formula for victory involves getting the right data in front of that driver in real time — and making it easy to prioritize the choices that matter most.

When it comes to cybersecurity, those choices go all the way to the top. In the corporate world, the buck stops with the board of directors — which makes their evolving priorities a bellwether of what matters most to enterprise decisionmakers. And as shown in a recent survey, enterprise security is fundamental to addressing their top priorities — as a key customer concern, as a regulatory hot button, and as the basis for building a trusted brand.

A recent survey shows that 38% of board directors identify cybersecurity as a top oversight challenge — ahead of digital transformation and new technologies (35%) or capital allocation (30%). And while directors are still most focused on revenue growth (60%) and increasing profitability (50%), they’re also increasingly aware that reaching those objectives depends on consumer trust. In fact, 49% of directors say customer satisfaction is the best indicator of a company’s performance in today’s environment — ahead of long-term total shareholder return (46%) or achieving/exceeding earnings guidance (46%).

Securing customer data and transactions is an essential part of winning that trust and achieving customer satisfaction — and is therefore indispensable.

The high importance of cybersecurity holds true even with respect to basic business drivers like revenue. To achieve revenue growth — which is, again, the top priority for directors surveyed — an organization must build a known, trusted brand that solves problems the market is willing to pay for. To reach the requisite level of trust in today’s environment therefore means addressing certain fundamentals of the Digital+ Economy. Among them:

• First, providing justifiable and resilient cybersecurity that can be explained to business stakeholders.
• Second, implementing digital transformation to enable solution delivery.

Now, it pains me to say this, but it’s true: You can’t secure everything. As long as we keep using networks, there’ll be no such thing as zero risk or zero threat. And since you can’t secure everything, you have to prioritize.

This has important consequences:

• With the bottom line ultimately driving decisions, that means treating cybersecurity as a business problem — like, say, shoplifting or manufacturing defects.
• It also means cybersecurity should be automated and integrated with business IT processes — not treated as an afterthought.

The latest version of HCL BigFix delivers on these requirements. Its new automation-driven CyberFOCUS Analytics capability enables IT operations for the first time to assess known critical vulnerabilities in near real time to proactively protect the enterprise against cyber attacks — combining Threat Intelligence with BigFix’s superior visibility of every endpoint. From collaboration through development and deployment, your organization must facilitate and protect data sharing on every device, from the user workspace to datacenter infrastructure to cloud. We can help. FIND OUT MORE.