The cost of trickling losses you don’t know of, can cripple your organisation

A 2016 report in the US stated that 6% of their companies make 50% of their profits.

Clearly, theres something this minority is doing right; and which the remaining 94% need to learn. From financial planning to guarding against risks, profitability involves a whole slew of variables.

In other words, organisations have to avoid uncertainties as much as possible, especially when costs are concerned. Yes, there are ones you cannot avoid, force majeure such as earthquake, flood, etc., besides incidents like wars, terrorist attacks etc;

Cybersecurity has emerged as one such business risk or unforeseen calamity. To the uninitiated, cybersecurity is the protection of valuable intellectual property and business information in digital form against theft and misuse.

There have been several cases where frauds, cyberattacks, system failure, etc. have wiped out several organisations.

Since we cannot anticipate such incidents, it is necessary to have firewalls in place to either avoid them or counter them to a manageable extent. When the cybersecurity of an organisation is compromised, it has a direct bearing on the organisations internal functioning.

The threat of cybercriminals or even disgruntled employees releasing sensitive information, taking intellectual property to competitors, or engaging in online fraud is very real.It may begin as a trickle, but the floodgates open soon enough.

Especially since today’s e-commerce economy and online payment systems, have amplified the volume of online transactions and created bigger incentives for cybercriminals. Moreover, corporations looking to mine data—for instance, transaction and customer information, results of product launches, and market information—create valuable intellectual property, and that is in itself an attractive target.

In the case of a cyberattack, it leads to severe downtime and loss of reputation that also has a huge financial impact. Indeed, businesses are not eager to advertise that they have had to “pay ransom” to cybercriminals or to describe the vulnerabilities that the attack exposed. To address this risk, organisations can, to a great extent, initiate suitable security controls to dispel them.

A specialised cybersecurity professional therefore, will going forward be an integral part of every organisation’s architecture. While there are no security systems that can guarantee total security, the idea should be to make the job of a hacker / fraudster difficult enough and force him / her to knock elsewhere.

This can happen only if the company takes a serious note of the emerging threats in the cyber-world and implements appropriate security measures. The very unpredictable nature and extent of losses that can occur due to security breaches makes it extremely important for every CIO to include cybersecurity in his / her toolkit.

For those developing cybersecurity technologies, the challenge is that technology has to actually address the challenges security professionals are currently facing, or it remains on the fringes as a cool but not practical option.

The good news is that a handful of companies have been able to anticipated such threats and take precautionary measures. Yet, many incidents continue to go unreported.

(This article is authored by Satish Warrier, Program Director- Cybersecurity Program, SP Jain School of High Technology)
(image: Thinkstock)