Building a Security-Centric Culture in a Digital Age

Cyber is here, there and everywhere in between. As our technology-dependent world grows, consumers and organizations alike are eager to adopt the latest innovations. Digital transformation has many people focused on IoT, SD-WAN and the cloud while the topic of security has been pushed to the back burner. We’re here to bring it front and center!

Deloitte’s Future of Cyber survey reveals a disconnect between an organization’s understanding of the importance of cybersecurity and its actions. In fact, only four percent of survey respondents reported cybersecurity appearing on their board’s agenda on a monthly basis. Aligning cyber initiatives to meet digital transformation priorities is more important now than ever before and requires all hands on deck. Remember, security is everyone’s responsibility not just one person’s or team’s. We all need to be vigilant.

Digital transformation necessitates greater collaboration, communication and awareness. To establish a cyber-minded culture within the workplace, executive management teams must reconsider risks and reconfigure strategies for cyber risk mitigation. Organizations using disruptive technologies will fail to achieve business goals when faced with data complexity challenges and cyber threats. Security itself will always be a goal of all organizations, but how an organization meets security goals will continue to change in our digital world.

Prioritizing security is KEY to aligning cyber initiatives and achieving a cyber-minded culture. But is your organization speaking the same cyber language? To keep everyone focused, we like to use the Cyber Research Databank acronym ‘SECURE’ to describe how to foster a security-centric culture:

• Simplify what it means to be secure. Using real-world experiences, correlate physical and cyber security. Would you share your social security number with a stranger? No, so why would you share confidential information through the cyber-verse?
• Educate your employees to understand the risks that are out there. To build a security-centric culture, talk to your employees about recent breaches and security news.
• Comply with regulations and understand how a breach could impact the entire organization. Intellectual property, sales lists and other classified information could cause damage if compromised.
• Understand that the goal of security teams and user communities is to make the organization successful. The cybersecurity team should work together with each department to discuss how they are handling security.
• Respect everyone’s opinions. To build a cyber-centric culture, a camaraderie must exist. Not everyone will agree with an organization’s cybersecurity stance, but you can agree to disagree.
• Evolve to the changing security environment. The cyber world is constantly evolving, and if you fail to adapt, you’ll fall victim to attackers.

Cyber is everywhere. It’s embedded into our culture and influences the way we act, think and communicate. As we embrace new technologies and continue to advance our digital ways, it’s important to understand how security is affected. Shifting the way we think about IT security in a digital age and adopting a security-centric mindset will help organizations and consumers act proactively to solve security challenges.