It’s often said that our reputation precedes us. When it comes to the damage that can be done by a cybersecurity incident, that couldn’t be more true. In today’s security-focused world, a single breach can dramatically impact the public perception of your organization, ultimately leading to a loss of business and a hit to your bottom line.
Preventing these damaging repercussions essentially comes down to your ability to continually monitor all the assets in your expanding digital ecosystem — across geographies, subsidiaries, and the increasingly remote workforce.
As cybersecurity comes to represent a larger threat to the global economy, organizations and consumers are increasingly making decisions about who they will do business with based on a company’s security reputation.
Does cyber reputation matter?
Would you do business with someone you didn’t trust? After all, as in life in general, trust is at the heart of every business relationship. But in an era when data has replaced almost all other assets as the most valuable thing most companies own, how do they know who to trust with those assets?
Mostly it comes down to reputation. A company that has suffered repeated data breaches or is known to be irresponsible in the way it handles either it’s own data or worse, that of its customers, is unlikely to get repeat business — and eventually it can impact the opportunity for new business. Indeed, according to Forrester, more than one-third of companies agree that they have lost business due to either a real or perceived lack of security rigor, and 82% of decision makers agree that the way customers and partners perceive security is increasingly important to the way their firm makes decisions. This has a material impact on shareholder value and company value.
The crux of the issue facing businesses is that few really have any idea where they stand. With the historical lack of a way to easily demonstrate security rigor — especially in the wake of a breach — often business decisions have come down to relying on the word on the street, memories of old news headlines, or arbitrary evaluations. And just like in social circles, once a reputation is tainted it can be a long, hard road back.
Reputation in the cloud era
No matter what new technologies come our way, reputation will always matter — especially in business. It can be difficult for data to dislodge the memory of an egregious headline, and it will always take time for confidence to recover. But that takes a very narrow, after the fact view of things.
The best way to preserve your reputation is to proactively preserve it and limit the potential for negative events.
While it’s a sad reality that perfect security is impossible, being able to demonstrate a reasonable standard of care and continuous improvement, verified with objective externally observable data, and openly communicated, can do much to assuage business partners. This starts with visibility into your assets and knowing what is where. Experience has shown that this crucial step has actually become remarkably hard in the cloud and SAAS era.
