This is the first in a blog series about building and maintaining brand trust. 

Transforming the enterprise for digital business requires a change in technology, process and culture. Along with this comes necessary changes on a cybersecurity strategy. Like walking on shifting sands, keeping cybersecurity strategy top of mind while going through major business transformations requires strength and balance. 

Sales, marketing, supply chain and customer success all move to a highly customized model for the client with the right mix of changes. Supporting this growth requires remaking the technology stack, opening up data to be used beyond just an inner circle and creating a culture of agile processes. This alters the risk models businesses use to safeguard the brand, protect clients, data and assets and meet legal standards.

At the heart of digital transformation is trust. Trust is a currency many use to measure risk. This concept is essential for entities handling digital transformation and the culture changes that spurred these strategies.

Changing Cybersecurity Strategy to Support Digital Transformation

In the past, cybersecurity strategy has been about stopping external threats in a reactive pattern to protect assets that could cause financial damage at any given moment. Doing business online changes and expands the surface area of attack. This increases risks and could even jeopardize a growing brand.

For example, cloud migration can help deliver new services that build trust in a brand to customers. However, relying on another vendor’s platform means companies also must rely on their security controls, which may or may not match those of the business.

Meanwhile, mergers and acquisitions could involve more digital vulnerabilities. These are just a part of modern business, but if you don’t fully understand the cybersecurity strategy of the target company, you may be putting your own business at risk.

Your partners and clients have access to elements of your systems through developer application programming interfaces, applications and other tools. That could open the door for insider threats if not managed properly. Therefore, you should actively manage access risks of digital transformation at every layer to maintain a high degree of trust in your organization.

This shift in risk can change how you define good security. Now, the measure of success for the security team will be two-fold. The team will work based on a total cybersecurity strategy, and in tandem, they will support innovation across the group.

Measuring the Risk to Build Trust

To walk the line between security controls and collaboration for innovation one thing is important to know — the risk effects of every decision. Many organizations don’t have clear quantification of their risk and lack the context necessary to make the quick security decisions that help instill trust in their services, their processes and their business. 

Once businesses and other entities understand their risks, the next step is to reinvent their approach so that trust is baked into every connection. The best way to do this is with a cybersecurity strategy where trust is based on the context of the action at hand. Zero Trust is a strategy for assuring the integrity of every connection into and throughout the business. It’s broad in its scope, covering controls that cross users, devices, applications, networks and data. Zero Trust is also the topic for the next blog in this series.