To stay ahead of the competition in today’s quickly changing digital landscape, organizations must find the best possible balance between innovation and security. Businesses may now take advantage of new market prospects, improved consumer experiences, and opportunities for revenue growth by implementing cutting-edge technology like artificial intelligence, data analytics, and the Internet of Things (IoT). But these creative projects frequently carry increased cybersecurity concerns.
This article looks at how business executives can address these issues and maintain a safe work environment.
Assess your current state
Prior to starting any digital transformation project, you should assess your security and resilience posture. To achieve this, a comprehensive risk assessment, an evaluation of your current security controls, policies, and procedures, and the identification of your important assets, data, and processes are required. It’s also necessary to compare your results to industry norms and best practices, including ISO 27001 or the NIST Cybersecurity Framework. You can use this to determine your areas of weakness, your top objectives, and your areas for growth.
Align your strategy and culture
Digital transformation encompasses strategy and culture in addition to technology. It is imperative to synchronize your security and innovation objectives with your company’s vision and mission and make sure all relevant parties are aware of them. Additionally, you must promote a climate of cooperation, accountability, and trust in which security is viewed as a shared duty and an accelerator of creativity rather than as an impediment or an afterthought. This can be achieved by early project involvement with your security team, ongoing training and awareness campaigns, and rewards for good deeds.
Adopt a risk-based approach
Experimenting with new models, platforms, and technologies as part of the digital transformation process may expose you to unidentified dangers. There are hazards that you cannot completely eradicate, and you cannot afford to impede innovation by putting in place inflexible and onerous security measures. As a result, you must use a risk-based strategy in which you rank the most important and consequential threats first and implement the right amount of security controls in accordance with the threat’s likelihood and severity. Additionally, you must keep an eye on your risk profile and security posture, review them, and make any necessary adjustments in light of feedback and the environment’s changing state.
Leverage security by design
The idea behind security by design is to incorporate security into all phases of the development and delivery process, starting with planning and design and continuing through testing, deployment, maintenance, and improvement. Rather than having to pay for and spend time correcting security issues after they arise, it can assist you in preventing or reducing them. Ensuring the dependability, functionality, and security of your products or services can also help you improve the customer experience through security design. Using secure coding techniques and tools, doing frequent testing and audits, and implementing agile and DevSecOps processes are all necessary to fully realize the potential of security by design.
Embrace cloud and automation
Two essential components of digital transformation are automation and the cloud, which allow you to lower costs, increase agility, and scale up your capabilities. They do, however, also bring with them fresh security difficulties, like configuration management, data privacy, and access control. Selecting reliable and trustworthy cloud service providers who can provide you with strong security features and compliance guarantees is essential if you want to safely adopt cloud computing and automation. Additionally, you must use solutions like cloud workload protection platforms (CWPP) and cloud security posture management (CSPM) to automate security procedures and duties like patching, scanning, and alerting.
Learn from others
The process of going digital is a journey, not a destination. It is always possible to gain knowledge, skills, and best practices from people who have experienced comparable or dissimilar things. You can accomplish this through reading blogs and papers, connecting with peers and experts, attending events and webinars, and joining industry forums and networks. In order to determine your strengths and shortcomings, you may also compare your performance and advancement to those of your colleagues and competitors. You may enhance your security and innovation outcomes, find new opportunities, and avoid typical mistakes by learning from others.
