How Better Governance Can Mitigate Future Digital Outages
The Trump administration is developing its own cybersecurity strategy amid concerns around cyber threats and the growing risk of disruptions for the public and private sectors. But beyond these policy efforts, enterprises and boards must sharpen their understanding of concentration risk and build governance structures capable of assessing and acting on the threat.
Accountability, transparency, and risk assessments
One major issue to address is the need to account for the market concentration in cloud and other IT services and the extent to which organizations rely on a small number of providers. The benefits of scale must be weighed against the risks associated with an increasing number of outages and disruptions. While this accounting is already practiced in some regulated industries, it is urgent to provide clarity with hard data, not with anecdotal evidence.
What is needed now is for mid-sized and large enterprises, and all federal government agencies, to demonstrate accountable governance through clear policy and practice. And that can only be accomplished if these entities are mandated to provide to their boards or overseers two distinct elements.
Related Knowledge Center: Digital privacy and data security
If you’re online, you’re generating a constant stream of information about yourself — sometimes voluntarily, sometimes unwittingly — that is assembled and used to craft your online experience. And generate wealth for data brokers. Meanwhile, designers and managers of the digital infrastructure on which the world depends are engaged in a never-ending effort to thwart attempts, by both criminal enterprises and state actors, to exploit vulnerabilities in those systems.
Signalgate | State surveillance