Cybersecurity becomes increasingly complex in a fast-moving business environment.
Cybersecurity has risen to the top of the corporate priorities list. According to a recent Gartner poll, 88% of board directors see cybersecurity as a business risk rather than a technological risk, suggesting that security is a component of the entire value chain. Cybersecurity is also a significant worry inside IT; CIOs polled by Gartner selected cyber and information security as their top area of increased investment for 2023, and expenditure on information security is expected to expand by double digits next year.
Even when firms raise their cybersecurity investment and attention, the quick speed of business and the acceleration of digitalization implies that mistakes become more frequent. As hazards connected with cyber-physical systems and IoT use, open-source code, cloud applications, complicated digital supply chains, social media, and more hamper the capacity to properly safeguard the organization, attack surfaces are growing. Furthermore, enterprises are ill-prepared to address the hazards posed by developing technology such as AI: According to a Gartner report, 41% of firms had already suffered an AI privacy or security problem. At the same time, cyber threat actors are changing to stay one step ahead.
The key takeaway for tech leaders is that it is not possible to provide appropriate protection through brute-force spending. Rather than trying to protect against every threat, including those new and unknown, enterprises need to prioritize cyber spending that protects business outcomes. Trying to beat threat actors without a strategic approach to protection-level agreements is a battle that organizations will almost certainly lose.
The bigger lesson for managers across functions is that security is everyone’s concern, not just IT’s. Security preparedness is frequently influenced by business decisions that have nothing to do with security, and few businesses are aware of this. Cybersecurity is an option. Organizations can select their degrees of protection and investments in order to strike a balance between the requirement to protect and the necessity to conduct the business. Managers outside of IT must recognize and embrace the fact that security is a context and result of the decisions they make every day for their teams and the company.
Responsible investment in emerging technologies will pay dividends.
Emerging technologies have always generated a lot of buzz. Within the last year, the metaverse has been elevated to a pedestal, lauded as the next great disruptor by both tech titans and entrepreneurs alike. This immersive digital utopia has whipped enterprises into a frenzy of anticipation, with industry leaders like Mark Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt, and Satya Nadella promising a complete transformation of digital experiences and unprecedented opportunities for those who jump on board. But…the metaverse does not yet exist, at least not in its entirety.
According to a recent Gartner poll, more than half of CEOs believe the metaverse will be a significant technology for the success of their firm. Furthermore, the Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies placed the metaverse at an early stage of development, forecasting that general adoption will take more than a decade. The metaverse does not stand alone in its position as a promising, but hyped, emerging technology: Web3, NFTs, super apps, generative AI, and numerous other innovations have massive potential implications for business disruption, but all are still in the early stages of development. This year, we’ve seen the damage that hype can have – just look at the abrupt crash of stablecoin in April or the recent collapse and subsequent bankruptcy of crypto exchange FTX. These busts shook an already declining market and eroded trust among market participants, leaving crypto in a delicate state with an uncertain future.
Yet, the precipice of hype does not preclude emerging technologies from being worthwhile investments. During the dot-com bubble, Pets.com and others like it failed due to flawed business models, but internet commerce eventually thrived. Similarly, despite hype and market failures, today’s emerging technologies continue to move forward.
Returning to the metaverse, companies have found success with metaverse-adjacent technologies like platforms for immersive streaming, VR headsets, and haptic gloves by focusing on targeted use cases. For example, immersive environments have helped police departments train in de-escalation and crisis intervention techniques. Manufacturing organizations have experimented with projecting unintrusive process instructions into the lenses of safety glasses. While the market sorts out how to monetize public metaverse offerings, these internal metaverse-adjacent experiments are providing immediate, practical benefits to the enterprise.
These developing technology applications are successful because they are targeted, studied, and, most importantly, provide higher value than the non-digital alternative. It’s not only an investment in technology for the sake of novelty. These high-value use cases provide new business prospects and innovation that would not otherwise be feasible. When new technology trends arise, too many executives succumb to FOMO and insist that something — anything — employing the new technology be adopted quickly. This results in lost expenditure, missed opportunities, and disenchantment with the new environment. Emerging technologies are vital and require attention and investment, but managers must be patient and avoid succumbing to hype. Exploration must be done responsibly.