It’s time to rethink how you approach and think about cybersecurity and privacy. Today, robust practices are necessary to create the culture and conditions required to meet today’s demands and truly differentiate your brand. But how do you accomplish this? Compliance is the bare minimum and not equivalent to creating robust cybersecurity and privacy practices. Instead, you need to be future fit.

On May 3, we announced Forrester Decisions: a new approach and brand-new platform focusing our research, insights, and collaborative resources on helping you solve the most challenging technology issues you face. For technology executives, that means delivering a technology strategy that enables customer obsession now and in the future — a strategy that drives your tech function to higher levels of resilience, adaptiveness, and creativity. As a result, we developed Forrester’s future fit technology strategy.

One of the seven pillars of this future fit strategy is to embed cybersecurity and privacy in your company. Security programs that focus inward on securing systems of record at the lowest possible cost are insufficient today. When you embed cybersecurity and privacy competencies across your business into physical assets, information and IP assets, customer experience, partner ecosystems, employee experience, and business investments, you protect what is core to your firm’s vision and brand promise. This requires CIOs to work with CISOs and heads of privacy on four key competencies:

  • Oversight: Insert cybersecurity and privacy specifics into strategy and governance. Define, articulate, measure, and address cybersecurity and privacy risks across your business and your ecosystem of partners and suppliers. Understand your current maturity and performance, identify gaps, and create a detailed roadmap for continuous improvement.
  • Human risk management: Use cultural efforts to foster an educated, engaged workforce. Hire people with sound ethical instincts and reward them for finding, communicating, and fixing problems. Treat cybersecurity and privacy as core values and ensure that these values permeate your organization and business processes.
  • Process risk management: Pursue security and privacy by design. “Built-in, not bolt-on” has rightly been a rallying cry for CISOs and privacy leaders for years. Seize the opportunity to build cybersecurity and privacy directly into your firm’s products and services as you develop them.
  • Technology risk management: Avoid expense-in-depth by focusing on what matters. Tune out vendor-driven fearmongering. Focus on four critical privacy and security technology areas for your technology transformation strategy: data governance, data security, cloud governance, and technology innovation.

Stay tuned! We’ll be here to guide tech execs (in addition to security, risk, and privacy leaders and pros) through developing your roadmap for embedding cybersecurity and privacy into your organization and executing on each of these four competencies through research and tools with the launch of Forrester Decisions.