Digitization of Cybersecurity

In a new July 2019 report titled “Cybersecurity: Linchpin of the digital enterprise”, McKinsey emphasizes that cybersecurity must support the digital agenda of the company. In this report McKinsey notes that cybersecurity operations of a company must be designed such that it facilitates the digital operations of the company and this means as a recent Deloitte publication also noted that it should be embedded into the digital strategy of the company and not function as a stand-alone security feature.

There is now a recognition that cybersecurity which has been functioning within the confines of Technology in most firms in the past now needs to be embedded into the overall strategy of the Firm as noted in a previous post. Along the same lines, this new report from McKinsey notes that this is more relevant than ever for the digitization strategy of the Firm’s operations. The report points that  cybersecurity is not immune to digitization and “needs to reinvent itself to support the digital aspirations of the Firm and without doing so “tensions (will) arise between the businesses need to digitize and the cybersecurity team’s responsibility to protect the organization”.  As companies are digitizing, the cybersecurity functions will go through a change themselves and will need to reinvent itself also.