CIOs agree that viewing data sovereignty through a narrow lens will be a hurdle for its progress.
Security leaders believe that it’s better to implement progressive and forward-thinking cyber strategies as enterprises move towards an increasingly digital post-pandemic environment.
Before the pandemic, organizations were moving towards an era of interconnection, open systems, and globalization. Partnerships between the private and public horizontals allowed the opening of new business models and markets.
Data localization or data sovereignty was the buzzword pretty early on, around the same time as when organizations across the world were eagerly adopting cloud platforms. This allowed data flow in and out from national borders. Organizations were concerned as the exact mechanism of data flow, storage, and consumption was yet unknown.
Data protection and privacy were the points of contention when confidential and private data of clients was easily accessible. It could be examined and duplicated in machines for user behavioral analysis, surveillance, advertising, and malicious intents.
Adopting a comprehensive approach
CIOs point out that implementation of data sovereignty will ensure securing the data within a nation’s borders. Still, it is not enough to protect it from hackers and threat actors. Nefarious hackers are known to cross any number of security measures and gain illegal access into the databases and systems.
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Cybersecurity teams must implement a comprehensive data management approach, and it needs management, tactical cyber-intelligence, and strategic planning. The multi-layer deployment involves security operations professionals and also governance and risk leaders.
Well-thought-out corporate risk policy updates are needed to ensure that potential cyber threats do not turn into full-fledged cyberattacks.
Changing the regulatory environment
Organizations in collaboration with public agencies have already implemented cyber laws; however, the enforcement is quite difficult. CIOs feel that specific segments within the circle of influence require fast improvement. Incident reporting is one of the main requirements.
Creating a research data body will help provide insights on potential threats and help develop strategies to boost the security profile. Another vital area for improvement is ensuring mandatory vulnerability and risk assessment of enterprises at least biannually. It helps identify threats early, and a mediation plan can be deployed to bridge any cybersecurity gaps.
The third step involves ensuring attack vector assessments, at least yearly. Such evaluations will identify new attack surfaces as organizations embrace new digital methods and expand on the supplied-partner-customer connections.
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It would be beneficial for the enterprise to adopt a cyber-reward culture where employees identifying liabilities and bugs and reporting the same to relevant teams get rewarded. This will improve the cybersecurity community connections and also increase a culture of joint resolutions and knowledge sharing sessions.
Understanding technology, process, people, and governance
CIOs believe that to ensure cyber resilience, the organization needs to build a foundation of cyber hygiene. “People” are the most important factor in this measure; it refers to employees and other individuals with access to the network.
They need to be trained on cyber risks and threats. It is critical in the current situation with increased occurrences of social engineering hacking campaigns and phishing attacks.
