Existential threat

There hasn’t been one moment of awakening in cybersecurity, but many.

Hospitals, pipeline operators, universities, social media platforms, credit rating agencies, municipalities, retailers, banks—all kinds of organizations have found themselves paralyzed and at the mercy of hackers who stole sensitive data, remotely shut down operations, and wormed their way into broader networks belonging to customers and suppliers. 

No industry or organization is immune. 

The problems inherent in cybersecurity are only likely to multiply in the coming years. As more organizations move their IT infrastructure to the cloud in the hybrid work era, hackers are using sophisticated strategies to exploit weak security points that present themselves, such as when employees are signing in from less secure home and remote networks. 

As the costs rise with each attack, C-suite executives are right to treat the issue as greater than just an IT department concern.  

Today, the threat is existential—each organization survives on the strength of its ability to manage risks and improve resilience. 

At TCS, we believe no matter the organization, industry or geography, the C-suite must be involved with cybersecurity. Each organization must take a deliberate, tailored, and comprehensive approach to combat inherent cybersecurity risks and threats.

Fighting cyber threats is not easy, however. It involves significant investment and requires multiple options and decisions.

Here, we lay out some of the core principles and approaches to building a cybersecurity strategy that is efficient, effective, durable, and resilient. 

Contextual risks

Risk comes in many forms, but cybersecurity measures must account precisely for local and industry-specific contexts.

Factors that need to be considered:

• Geopolitical and geographical — Multinational organizations must assess cyber risks in each local market. For example, many cyberattacks are sponsored by state actors. Often these attacks are not designed to destroy or disrupt an operation but to steal trade secrets or commit other forms of corporate espionage. 
• Regulatory complexity — Legislation in the EU and the Americas has resulted in increasingly stringent regulations around data security. Rules governing the response to cyberattacks and when to report a data breach can vary widely from one geography to another. By 2023, 65% of the world’s population may have personal data covered under privacy regulations, up from 10% today. Global enterprises must gear up to meet these disparate and complex compliance requirements.

Zero trust mindset

For too long, organizations have viewed their own people as fundamentally trustworthy and capable of reasonable cybersecurity habits.

In fact, people present the greatest risk to an organization’s cybersecurity. Employees and executives expose vulnerabilities inadvertently or fail to keep networks secure. Many organizations have found too late that their systems are only as secure as their least vigilant vendor or employee. 

Our experience suggests that the best solution is built on a zero trust model, which considers all internal and external entities as ‘untrustworthy’ and a potential source for breaches of the organization’s security. Nothing is trusted by default; everything requires verification. This security model is designed to be context-aware, risk-driven, and adaptive enough to meet the fast-changing and rapidly-expanding complex threat landscape.

Delivering against this assumption requires attention and investment at the highest level. We have developed specific tactics, such as regular testing and AI-driven analyses of employee behavior, all of which establish a zero trust model throughout the enterprise, educating employees and third parties on its principles and enforcing it rigorously. 

With a culture of awareness and a supporting system, even a successful attack is blunted in its impact, and the attackers are more likely to be discovered before they can do too much damage.