This post is also available in: 日本語 (Japanese)
Co-Authors:
- Rick Congdon, President WW Sales of Palo Alto Networks
- Ryan LaSalle, Senior Managing Director – Accenture Security, North America Lead
In their urgent efforts to defend themselves against cyber threats that are growing in frequency and severity, many organizations find themselves trapped in a dilemma: Prioritize security to the detriment of business objectives or pursue business opportunities at the risk of reduced security.
But, there is a third option to these outdated approaches: Baking security into business strategy from the ground up. Accenture calls organizations that can achieve this alignment “Cyber Champions.”
Cyber Champions
Being a Cyber Champion generates significant rewards. According to Accenture, “Business Blockers” (those who prioritize cyber resilience over business alignment) could reduce their cost of breaches by 48%, and “Cyber Risk Takers'' (those who prioritize business growth) could reduce costs by 65%, if they emulated Cyber Champions.
How can companies evolve into Cyber Champions? A comprehensive cybersecurity transformation enables and even improves operational resilience. It evolves to meet security challenges across the enterprise and empowers them to innovate without increasing cyber risk.
Cybersecurity transformation creates a foundation for broader digital transformation that provides value in multiple ways, specifically cybersecurity transformation:
Accelerates Business and Digital Transformation: Providing the underlying technology components to facilitate expansion of the cloud enables employees to remain efficient while working remotely and unlocks access to new talent pools. In addition, cybersecurity transformation tunes the network in real time to provide the best possible user experience – all without compromising security.
Proactively Protects Against Today’s Threat Landscape: This has expanded, thanks to remote work, shifting regulatory requirements and savvy attackers, who are increasingly trying new and different ways to exploit organizational data. Businesses need a broad set of the right tools and security tactics that can continuously evolve with new capabilities, rather than a continuously expanding security architecture. Adopting a Zero Trust security posture, which protects data irrespective of device or network, is a critical component of this strategy. This can and should be a goal of any cybersecurity transformation effort.
Achieves Long-Term Cost Avoidance and Savings: Address IT talent challenges and shortages with automation and new ways of working while taming technological complexity to reduce the cost of ownership. An integrated approach eases the burden of security on the business by shifting security away from being a roadblock and toward becoming an essential, seamless capability. A modern cybersecurity platform also creates opportunities for significant cost savings, particularly when consolidating point products into a single, comprehensive solution that builds onto existing investments.
Serves as a Brand Differentiator: Build trust and educate your customer and supplier base, all while reducing your own cyber exposure. Building cybersecurity into the fabric of your development processes and network ecosystem helps you build a reputation for supporting your customers’ data security and user experience. By putting the customer first in this way, you become a trusted brand of choice, creating a competitive differentiator that leads to increased revenues and profitability.
Taken together, these attributes help to safely enable digital transformation, unlock innovation and support customers’ data security and user experience. Use these tips to get started:
- Create a secure, flexible and scalable network architecture that can support a mobile workforce as well as customers, suppliers and partners.
- Take a comprehensive approach to modernizing the network, multi-cloud environment and operations that utilizes new integrated thinking, tools and processes. This eases the transformation journey to the cloud and supports a work-from-anywhere approach.
- Integrate security into the DevOps process, so it doesn’t become an impediment to this rapid development pace, or worse, result in live applications that have critical security flaws.
What’s more, Cyber Champions take advantage of the expertise and ongoing commitment to innovation provided by organizations like Accenture and Palo Alto Networks, speeding their journey toward cyber maturity with long-term strategies and programs. This allows them to build capabilities in the near term that keeps them ahead of the attackers while providing feedback into platform roadmaps.
The industry-leading technology and security platform of Palo Alto Networks, combined with Accenture’s domain expertise and implementation experience, enables your business transformation by giving you the confidence to innovate your business with uncompromising security. With over 85,000 customers (including 95 of the Fortune 100) in more than 150 countries, Palo Alto Networks is number one in enterprise security, while Accenture employs more than 8,000 skilled security professionals who manage over 25 million endpoints for more than 1,500 clients across 67 countries.
This combination of expertise, services and technology can solve even the most complex cybersecurity challenges for organizations across multiple industries. Together, we can help you determine where you are on the security maturity continuum. We can assist you with creation, implementation and management of a customized strategy and roadmap, speeding you along your security transformation journey.
Learn how Palo Alto Networks and Accenture can fuel your cybersecurity transformation.