Cybersecurity is Central to Digital Transformation
Digital transformation advances all business areas, fundamentally optimizing business processes and delivering value to customers. Successful digital transformation demands speed and agility over a sustained period, necessitating that cybersecurity keeps pace and becomes equally robust and responsive to changes in business and technology.
Spending on digital transformation is expected to reach $1.8 trillion in 2022 as businesses realize the importance of digitizing their operations. Business entities and their digital transformation specialists must prioritize cybersecurity, especially as businesses accelerate their digital projects to become crucial elements of operations. How, then, can digital transformation stakeholders make cybersecurity a more centralized aspect of digital transformation, and how does low-code development aid with such a comprehensive transition?
Why Digital Transformation Specialists Should Prioritize Cybersecurity
One security incident can completely destroy a company’s entire digital transformation strategy, incurring significant damage to its financial framework and reputation. The average cost of a data breach topped the $4.24 million mark in 2021—the highest average cost in nearly two decades.
Heightened importance has been placed on safeguarding digital technology throughout companies, putting pressure on digital transformation officers to ensure that the continuity of business operations remains intact whenever a disruption occurs. As a result, digital transformation strategists must identify and capitalize on key trends, basing their solutions on cybersecurity best practices.
Safeguarding all Digital Assets
Companies have learned a lot about themselves and their capabilities throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, as they utilize digital technologies to recover from the technology disruptions and added cybersecurity risk it has caused. Many companies have struggled to ensure the stability of their business processes as their IT infrastructures were typically negatively impacted by the pandemic’s disruptions. This has necessitated more robust ways to secure critical digital assets.
Digital transformation officers must improve their management of detailed digital asset inventory, highlighting the crucial resources that need protection, such as network repositories, data centers and business information. Companies should also account for the assets that were not counted during the digitization of their business processes.
For digital transformation security, establishing the ownership and valuation of digital assets, limiting access, and more comprehensive monitoring are solid solutions to ensuring all assets are preserved and maintained consistently.
Refined Approaches to Cybersecurity Management and Outsourcing Tasks
If and when a crisis strikes, companies must be prepared to protect themselves while maintaining business operations. Proper preparation requires strong collaboration among digital transformation officers (DTOs) and chief information security officers (CISOs) to sanction software for digital projects, ensure adequate defenses against hacking and ransomware attacks, consistently update business continuity and plans, and improve approaches to incident response.
DTOs should have strong knowledge of the latest cybersecurity trends, including the increased advent of biometric technology to introduce passwordless solutions, increased security budgets due to updated cybersecurity regulations, and expected increases in ransomware attacks and phishing scams.
With a refined approach to cybersecurity management, companies will better align their security strategies to their enterprise goals, striking the balance between enabling business innovation and mitigating risk to ensure a smooth path to the desired level of digital transformation. Securing digital transformation also requires clear, risk-based decision making, understanding all the potential risks posed by digital transformation while weighing whether the benefits accumulated by the business outweighs the costs of managing those risks. Risk-based decision-making based on a fact-driven approach will determine the best outcome of any digital transformation strategy while driving productivity and usability. Cybersecurity must proceed at the same speed as other innovations driving digital transformation to ensure that progress isn’t compromised. Any cybersecurity measures built will instill confidence and drive user adoption, making digital transformation easier to implement across the organization.
Another thing for companies to consider is that, as a digital transformation project can involve a complex and layered process requiring significant investments, companies may face a struggle to integrate qualified personnel specializing in cybersecurity. The shortage of cybersecurity professionals is profound, with the number of professionals topping the three million mark. Thankfully, software specialists and expert organizations ensure companies succeed in implementing digital transformation strategies with cybersecurity as a central component. Specialist companies can provide the software and skilled practitioners that can implement cybersecurity measures and monitor that aspect so companies can focus on other pertinent aspects of the transformation.
The Cybersecurity Solutions Aiding Digital Transformation
Aside from hiring security personnel or a security specialist firm to help with cybersecurity, companies can also turn to secure software that does some of the security work for them. Low-code software is now recognized as the next big innovation for digital transformation especially given all the pandemic-induced business disruptions. Many industries now use low-code or no-code solutions to speed system development and improve their scalability. The low-code/no-code route enables software developers, specialists and non-specialists to build enterprise-grade, task-based applications quickly automate business tasks and create applications that work on mobile devices, networks and in the cloud. By training non-technical employees to use low-code/no-code software to automate business tasks, businesses can ensure their digital transformation strategies are executed effortlessly, at all levels.
Considering that applications are to account for 65% of development activity within the next two years, their role in executing cybersecurity strategies will likely increase. Low-code includes built-in security features like:
- File monitoring
- User control
- Code validation
Companies must ensure that each new low-code/no-code application introduces no security threats to the company’s infrastructure, considering the data used and the connection points to the application. Secure coding practices are crucial to digital transformation, with the code consistently and scrutinized. Internet-facing applications require increased oversight. A trusted security-conscious low-code/no-code software vendor is paramount.
IT organizations are also introducing edge security solutions to protect users and systems beyond traditional enterprise security measures, including software-defined wide-area network services. With zero-trust network architectures (ZTNA), companies require additional, continuous verification of all users and processes for system touchpoints, creating additional security layers into digital transformation.
The zero-trust approach, while creating more data location awareness, can’t protect what it can’t see, namely hidden or undocumented systems and applications. Companies must upgrade and refine their legacy systems to adopt a true zero-trust approach across the environment.
Consistent investment in data loss prevention services has also become commonplace while other network security aspects are being prioritized, secure web gateways, cloud security, and endpoint detection.
Heightened global competition and an increasing focus on hacking and ransomware will continue to grip industries and force them to become more automated in a digital world that, especially in the pandemic era, shows very little sign of slowing down. For automation to be at its most efficient and to be widely adopted within a company, cybersecurity of digital transformation strategy.
