Tech Trends in Practice

TREND 20Cybersecurity and Cyber Resilience

The One-Sentence Definition

Cybersecurity is a company’s ability to avoid the increasing threat from cybercrime, such as cyberattacks or data theft; cyber resilience is a company’s ability to mitigate damage and carry on once systems or data have been compromised.

What Is Cybersecurity and Resilience?

Technology brings unprecedented new opportunities but also unprecedented new threats. In our always-on, always-connected world we see increasing flows of data between companies, their customers, their partners, and their service providers. Businesses rely on interconnected systems and customers expect a 24/7 service.

This means cyber threats such as hacking, phishing, ransomware, and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks have the potential to cause enormous problems. Services can be disrupted, leading to a loss of trust between customers and providers. Worse still, sensitive personal and financial data can be lost or stolen. Not only is this a blow to consumer confidence that many organizations simply won’t be able to recover from, but it can also lead to huge fines from regulators.

A report by IBM found the average cost of a breach to an organization in which personal data was stolen is $3.86 million – equating to a cost of around $148 per stolen record.¹

Huge fines such as the £183 million British Airways was ordered to pay after customer data was compromised during a cyberattack are making news headlines with increasing frequency. ...