March 29, 2018 By Lynne Murray 3 min read

Greater cybercriminal sophistication, regulations and customer privacy expectations are ushering in a new era of data security accountability. Critical data and information — including customer information, intellectual property and strategic plans — are key to organizations’ competitiveness, but a breach of this data can have disastrous consequences.

Business leaders must play an active role in protecting against the risks associated with breaches of critical business data and intellectual property. But IT, security and risk teams speak a different language from business leaders and often struggle to equip them with the information they need to make effective decisions. Tools that give executives business-relevant data security visibility can help bridge the divide.

Who Is Accountable for Data Security?

Though data security has long been the purview of IT and security teams, the market is shifting, and business executives must take notice. IBM commissioned Forrester Consulting to survey 150 IT, security and risk decision-makers to examine their approach to protecting their company’s critical information and communicating data risk to senior business executives.

The Forrester report, “Is Your Company in Peril If Critical Data Is Breached?,” found that CEOs and boards of directors are most accountable to external stakeholders when data is compromised. It’s no longer optional: Business leaders must play an active role in protecting their company’s critical data assets. As recent, highly publicized breaches have demonstrated, their firm’s reputation and stock price, as well as their jobs, are at stake.

Source: Forrester Research

Opportunities and Threats Are Intertwined

With the opportunity to use data to improve business operations and customer experiences comes the threat of data compromise and loss. But before IT and business executives can take on their data security responsibilities, they must first identify their company’s critical assets — the ones that are key to the organization’s success and would pose considerable risk if compromised.

Over 70 percent of IT and security professionals believe it’s important for business executives to have visibility into a long list of data security metrics. IT and security professionals struggle to distinguish between tactical, operational and strategic security priorities.

However, it is imperative that they are able to communicate these very priorities to business leaders, who often lack security expertise, in a language they understand. While it may be tempting to develop a long list of metrics for everyone, security information needs to be explained in a context that the intended audience can relate to and comprehend.

Investing in Security Controls to Protect Critical Data

Seventy-nine percent of respondents to the Forrester study said they feel they can justify the business case for a centralized, business-friendly command center with these capabilities. To help avoid disastrous consequences, including incident response costs, regulatory fines, plummeting stock prices and shattered reputations, a data risk management program is critical.

Investing now in data security controls that align IT, security and the business can help prevent costly breaches down the road and ensure that key stakeholders come together to help execute the company’s security strategy.

To learn more, watch our on-demand webinar, “Bridging the Data Risk Divide,” featuring guest speakers Heidi Shey, senior analyst serving security and risk for Forrester, and Daniel Goodes, worldwide data security technical leader IBM. They will discuss recent Forrester research surrounding data risk management.

Watch the on-demand webinar: Bridging the Data Risk Divide

More from Data Protection

How data residency impacts security and compliance

3 min read - Every piece of your organization’s data is stored in a physical location. Even data stored in a cloud environment lives in a physical location on the virtual server. However, the data may not be in the location you expect, especially if your company uses multiple cloud providers. The data you are trying to protect may be stored literally across the world from where you sit right now or even in multiple locations at the same time. And if you don’t…

From federation to fabric: IAM’s evolution

15 min read - In the modern day, we’ve come to expect that our various applications can share our identity information with one another. Most of our core systems federate seamlessly and bi-directionally. This means that you can quite easily register and log in to a given service with the user account from another service or even invert that process (technically possible, not always advisable). But what is the next step in our evolution towards greater interoperability between our applications, services and systems?Identity and…

The compelling need for cloud-native data protection

4 min read - Cloud environments were frequent targets for cyber attackers in 2023. Eighty-two percent of breaches that involved data stored in the cloud were in public, private or multi-cloud environments. Attackers gained the most access to multi-cloud environments, with 39% of breaches spanning multi-cloud environments because of the more complicated security issues. The cost of these cloud breaches totaled $4.75 million, higher than the average cost of $4.45 million for all data breaches.The reason for this high cost is not only the…

Topic updates

Get email updates and stay ahead of the latest threats to the security landscape, thought leadership and research.
Subscribe today