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Thinking about digital resilience requires an understanding of cyber-attacks and cybersecurity and how they fit into the digital ecosystem.

Cyber-attacks: Risks across the Business Model

In an increasingly digitized economy, all the world’s important institutions depend on “information assets,” structured and unstructured information such as customer data, intellectual property, and business plans, as well as on online processes that include everything from customer servicing to vendor payments. Cyber-attacks compromise information assets to further attackers’ personal, economic, political, or national-strategic objectives. While the popular press has focused on a few examples of cyber-attacks, typically theft of intellectual property and credit card information, companies have to take a broader range of potential risks into account (Table P.1).

TABLE P.1 Companies Face a Wide Range of Cybersecurity Risks

Cybersecurity: How Companies Have Protected Themselves

Cybersecurity1 is the business function of protecting an institution from the damage caused by cyber-attacks in the face of constraints such as other business objectives, resource limitations, and compliance requirements. It has three facets: risk management, influencing, and delivery.

Cybersecurity is first and foremost a risk management function– there is no way to prevent all cyber-attacks from happening. As one chief information security officer (CISO) puts it, “My job isn’t to reduce risk. My job is to enable the business to take intelligent risks.”

If a company launches a new mobile servicing platform for customers, it is taking a risk – the mobile platform creates a new way for attackers to get at company data. But it is also seeking a return: it hopes the platform will improve revenues per customer. As a risk manager, the CISO helps business leaders make intelligent decisions about the risk of cyber-attack by answering questions such as:

● What are the risks associated with a new mobile platform? Does the business return justify the incremental risks?

● How can the mobile platform be designed to yield the best possible customer experience (and therefore business impact) at the lowest risk of losing data to a cyber-attack?

Cybersecurity is also an influencing function. The decisions CISOs make in tandem with business leaders on the right mix of risk and return lead to far-ranging actions across different parts of the organization: procurement teams have to negotiate security requirements into contracts; managers must limit the distribution of sensitive documents; developers have to design secure applications and write secure code. Cybersecurity necessarily involves a wide variety of stakeholders, some of whom need to be guided by compliance, some by less rigid and more persuasive measures.

Finally, cybersecurity is a delivery function that includes managing both technologies such as firewalls, intrusion detection, malware detection, and identity and access management, and also activities that are focused primarily on protecting information assets and online processes such as compiling and analyzing threat intelligence and conducting forensic analysis.

Naturally, cybersecurity as a business function is not the same as cybersecurity as an organization. A company may decide to consolidate all or most risk management, influencing, and delivery activities into a single cybersecurity group or distribute them among several organizations.

The Digital Ecosystem: Companies Cannot Protect Themselves Alone

Although institutions must protect themselves, they do so in the context of a broader digital ecosystem (Figure P.1), which includes:

● Business customers. Given the need to connect corporate networks to ease collaboration, business customers are a source of risk and vulnerability for many companies. Attackers may use a customer’s IT environment as a way into a supplier’s network. Equally, business customers worry about how their suppliers protect data. Both situations can create stringent security expectations and requirements for many companies.

● Retail customers. Consumers are not yet as sensitized to the risk of cyber-attacks as businesses, but their expectations about how companies should protect their data are starting to influence their buying decisions.

● Business suppliers. Suppliers such as law firms, accounting firms, banks, and business process outsourcing providers will handle a company’s most sensitive data at some point. In addition, like business customers, suppliers can provide an entry point for attackers, given the interconnection of corporate networks.

● Technology suppliers. Vendors are a source of both risk and risk remediation. Any technology a company buys may have security flaws that create vulnerabilities attackers can exploit. However, technology vendors also offer products and services that enable companies to reduce risk by eliminating vulnerabilities, analyzing cyber-attacks, and otherwise protecting their corporate technology environments.

● Government agencies. The public sector – in the form of different types of agencies or ministries in each jurisdiction – plays multiple roles that affect the cybersecurity environment. It investigates attacks and prosecutes attackers. It regulates private companies, sometimes requiring specific protections or retaining the right to approve a company’s cybersecurity strategy. It may also adjust civil law, provide subsidies, perform research, share intelligence, disseminate know-how, or provide capabilities with the objective of reducing the economic damage from cyber-attacks.

● Civil society groups. There is a huge range of civil society groups that participate in the digital ecosystem, from industry associations to standards-setting bodies and advocacy groups.

● Insurers. Cyber-insurance is in its early days, but even today carriers can enable companies to transfer some risks related to cyber-attacks in return for cash premiums.

FIGURE P.1 Companies Face a Wide Range of Cybersecurity Risks

What Do We Mean by Digital Resilience?

Senior executives sometimes ask chief information officers (CIOs) and CISOs when cybersecurity will be solved – when the risk of cyber- attack will go away and they can stop worrying about it. Sometimes they draw an analogy with commercial aviation. At the dawn of the jet age, there were some horrifying crashes. Now, while airlines continue to pay obsessive attention to safety, the cab ride to the airport is typically the most dangerous part of air travel.

Indeed, driving may be a better analogy for cybersecurity. A vastly wider group of people undertakes a vastly wider set of activities using a vastly wider range of vehicles than is the case with commercial aviation. As a society, we could choose to reduce automotive fatalities to almost zero by increasing the driving age to 30 and reducing the speed limit to 25 miles per hour, but that would have a devastating impact on the value of personal transportation.

Or take financial risk. A banking CEO would never ask when she can stop worrying about market and credit risk. She understands that her institution is in the business of accepting these risks in exchange for economic returns. Therefore, her business depends on understanding market, credit, and other risks and managing them appropriately in the context of potential returns.

Given increasing digitization, rapid technology innovation, and attackers that may be beyond the reach of law enforcement, the world economy cannot expect to eliminate the prospect of cyber-attacks anytime soon. Companies and economies can, however, aspire to achieve a state of digital resilience in which:

● Companies understand the risks of cyber-attacks and can make business decisions where the returns justify the incremental risks.

● Companies have confidence that the risks of cyber-attack are manageable, rather than strategic – they do not put the company’s competitive position or very existence at risk.

● Consumers and business have confidence in the online economy – the risks to information assets and of online fraud are not a brake to the growth of digital commerce.

● The risk of cyber-attack does not prevent companies from continuing to take advantage of technology innovation.

It is in this context that the World Economic Forum and McKinsey & Company have collaborated to understand how to help both companies and countries reach their aspirations.