Matthew Rosenquist argues that companies like Apple and AWS use security as a competitive advantage, while SolarWinds and Meta suffer from trust deficits. He outlines three ways to measure cybersecurity value: peer comparison, operational efficiency, and leveraging digital trust for growth instead of treating it as a cost center.
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The value of cybersecurity is woefully misunderstood and underappreciated. Organizations are only beginning to realize the important business value opportunities that cybersecurity can bring to the table. CEOs and boards are placing more emphasis on cybersecurity, privacy, and digital safety, but do they have the right level of insights to the opportunities, or are they purely reacting of fear. It's a systemic problem in the digital industry, as too often cybersecurity is seen solely as a cost center to protect from cyberattack losses and not as an enabler for business competitiveness and success. It's important to understand both the risks and the opportunities. Seeing the overall value and potential of cybersecurity is not easy. A lack of proper cybersecurity can inhibit the business. Exploitable weaknesses can cause damage from attacks. And perhaps most importantly, as consumers become more concerned with digital security, respect for their privacy and personal safety, The value of cybersecurity rises to be a purchase criterion, therefore a competitive advantage. The business world is demanding better cybersecurity leadership because it can both inhibit or be an enabler to support the organization's operational goals. It all comes down to trust. Business partners, third-party vendors, cyber insurance underwriters, and regulators are requiring assurances and transparency. Perhaps the most telling influence is emerging from product sales and marketing teams who see the relevance of a strong brand reputation, customer loyalty, and marketing features that could increase revenues by earning a differentiating degree of customer goodwill. Customers are expecting better reliability in the face of hackers, more robust protections for the integrity of transactions, and confidence in the handling of their personal data. And they also want designs that improve safety while operating in our connected online online world. It's a competitive advantage that some organizations are failing to recognize while others are moving quickly to leverage. Leading companies are using these aspects to compete in new, non-traditional ways. Apple has worked hard to establish itself as a leader for digital privacy. To protect its customers' personal data across its products and services, and its marketing definitely takes advantage of that fact. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, uh, Google Cloud have all invested billions to compete in terms of digital security, transaction integrity, and compute availability. The finance sector has aggressively advocated for trust across its digital services, indicating that regulatory compliance isn't sufficient. Big companies like JPMorgan Chase spend over a billion dollars annually to protect their reputations and ensure digital assets are secure and available to their clients. The biggest and best companies are aggressively pursuing a path to establish digital trust with customers. Conversely, trust rankings show that when companies like SolarWinds, Huawei, and Facebook, now rebranded as Meta, when they're mentioned, consumers often don't view them as trustworthy entities that are actively working to ensure their products and services are secure that they're respecting the customer's privacy, or even that they're safe to use. This lack of digital trust represents a drag on their success, and in some cases, a severe encumbrance to growth. The industry must get better. I've been working with thought leaders from AltenSolon to explore these challenges and help them provide business insight strategies for executive leadership. There are 3 fundamental areas to assess in order to close this cybersecurity value blind spot. The first is comparative ranking against competitors. With respect to your peers, is your organization an easy victim of attack? Are you perceived as trustworthy by the market, uh, across security, privacy, and safety? And how do you compare to others in your peer group? Are the security, compliance, privacy, and product teams working in close partnership to adapt to future challenges better than the competition? The second area is effectiveness and efficiency to support the corporate goals. How effective is your combination of technology, tools, people, process across your operations and your product development teams? Are programs efficiently aligning resources to the most likely threats? Is there clarity throughout the organization in how cybersecurity objectives support the corporate goals? The third area is about competitive advantage opportunities. And an organization has to ask itself, how is digital trust being leveraged for competitive positioning of its products and services? Is cybersecurity maximized to support business success? Things like, uh, gaining market share, brand ranking, average selling prices, or good, better, best pricing strategies. Are competitors maneuvering to advance the digital trust of their products and services? And are there missing non-traditional competition opportunities? Comprehending where an organization stands and the valuable opportunities it can seize is powerful. The right information, digital trust stat— strategies can be pursued, justified with confidence, and executed to enhance the business. Cybersecurity has much more value than most organizations perceive. Far too often, there's a blind spot where companies fail to capitalize on meaningful benefits that enable the pursuit of business goals. Savvy businesses are developing strategies that maximize cybersecurity to build valuable trust with partners, regulators, and most importantly, their customers.
