The document outlines essential cyber-security leadership imperatives for business leaders navigating digital transformation, emphasizing the rapid acceleration of digitization and its associated risks. It presents four key imperatives: defining success criteria in terms of business outcomes, prioritizing critical assets, adopting a proactive risk management approach, and creating a 'war game' capability for rehearsing responses to potential threats. Overall, it highlights the need for integrating cyber-security into strategic business discussions to avoid value loss due to increased risks.

1. Navigating the cyber-security vortex
Security leadership for the Digital Age
This paper outlines critical security leadership imperatives for those charged with the digital transformation and business innovation agenda inside businesses today.
2014
Charles Forte
CharlesForte Solutions Limited
5/10/2014

2. This paper outlines 4 cyber-security leadership imperatives that business leaders must consider as they lead the business towards realising the benefits of increased digitisation.
The unprecedented rate of change driving business opportunity
The pace and range of digitisation is accelerating and is creating huge new revenue generating possibilities for businesses on an unprecedented scale. Digital technology is now an inherent part of every new product and service, is internet connected and generates data that can be interpreted to create new business opportunities.
Cultural changes driven by consumerism, the use of social media and the ability to connect from anywhere has created consumers who interact and buy in very different ways. Predictions are that internet connected devices will have grown from 2000m in 2010 to 19,000m by 2018 and that this new ‘internet of everything’ will generate up to $20trillion of new revenue by 2020.
The forces that drive risk and create a potential ‘drag’ on value realisation
These changes drive disruptive opportunities to create new business models and dynamically change existing ways of doing business, but also drive business models that need to be increasingly connected, accessible, integrated and open. This opens the door for a sophisticated community of criminals, activists, spies, terrorists and nation states to create and exploit vulnerabilities. Risks extend beyond financial loss through theft and disruption to loss of IP and to physical threats at national scale. Despite lots of investment the pace of response struggles to keep pace with the threats.
Governments are increasingly legislating to create new levels of compliance protecting individuals and national infrastructure. Board rooms are becoming more aware of these dynamics and cyber- security is increasingly a priority risk topic. Some commentators are predicting that this may create a risk aversion response that will delay up to $3 trillion in value and create a real ‘economic drag’.
Opposing forces that may delay value realisation

3. Four leadership imperatives
How are we to successfully innovate and realise new value to avoid a ‘value drag’ impact from these increasingly turbulent waters? Here are 4 leadership imperatives business leaders must engage with.
1. Define clear success criteria in business outcome terms and integrate cyber- security awareness as a core part of the business conversation
The growing nature of the cyber-security risk and its impact means that businesses will need to make careful choices between value and risk at the highest level. Defining ‘what good looks like’ in business outcome terms is critical in shaping the business appetite for value versus risk assessments and turning implicit ‘risk aversion’ reactions into clear and explicit strategic directions with consequent resource allocation decisions. Executive level engagement is also key to creating the right cultural awareness at all levels and driving the cross-functional involvement required to effectively integrate the topic into business operational thinking.
2. Prioritise assets recognising that you cannot protect everything with equal intensity
Focus on what is important and do not try to ‘fix’ or address everything. Decide what is most important, accessing the strategic conversation on ‘what good looks like’ and using a risk and impact based approach employing differentiated protection, controls and responses to what matters most. This must work as an active conversation to keep the view of priorities current.
3. Move to a pro-active and predictive approach vs a singular focus on reactive response
Protecting assets with the right technology and controls is essential but not sufficient. The dynamic nature of the risk means it is critical to develop a balanced approach that predicts and senses attacks and continuously tunes the response. Create a capability built around a ‘PROTECT - SENSE - RESPOND’ cycle.
4. Create a ‘war game’ capability to rehearse risk scenarios and responses
This approach recognises that things will go wrong and as such a successful way of managing cyber-security must include practising how to respond effectively as a business, involving all functions. Cross functional engagement and practising with a ‘war game’ mentality will create an effective and integrated business response and will illuminate learning and new insights in a virtuous improvement cycle.