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Why Should Every Organization Consider Cybersecurity in their Business Strategy?

These days business operation can't take place without using the technology and internet. Business must use computer network and system to perform their operations. Traditional methods of handling data and performing the job are already obsolete and workstation are digitalized. Information of an organization are being stored in the cloud and the type of information that any organization collects is increasing. Since, technology has become the part of business operation new strategy means more data, more information and more use of technology.


If the organization is collecting more information and storing the data, then the responsibly to keep that information security will increase. The organization must understand the current state of information security and potential risk to information after implementing the new business strategy. All the technical components like hardware, software, network configurations, must be reviewed to get information about security issues. Flaw on any one component means security threat to the critical information.


For example, a business is planning to move to the new country and to find out about their potential customer they might collect information about their interest and their information. The information they gather from the potential customer is stored in the database of the organization. Now, it is the responsibility of the organization to keep that information secure. There is always a risk to the information and threat are lying around us. If we don’t think about security while making plans and strategies, then we might not be able to achieve our goals.
Improper security plan will result in the failure of the organization and this is not a good strategy to run any business.

We should think about the potential security threat and the ways to secure it before implementing any strategies. Also, the strategies that we implement might create security loopholes in the system. In my opinion, security will influence an organization's strategy and strategy will impact their security. We can't isolate the impact of strategy on security and the implementation of strategy considering the security.

Let’s take the example of a store that only has a physical store and planning to go online and made a strategy to open their e-commerce website. To run their own e-commerce website, they need to store information of clients like their name, address, email, phone no. etc. Also, they need to securely process the transaction using credit cards or another payment gateway like PayPal. Now, they should make a strategy to store the information collected from the client securely. If they can’t guarantee the security of information collected from the customer, then they can’t be a success in their business. In this case, they first need to build a properly secure system that store information of customer and process the transaction securely. They might need to change their strategy to protect the data of the customer. Therefore, security will influence the strategy they make for their business.

On the other hand, strategy and plans can impact the security posture of the organization. We know that nothing is secure on the internet and every infrastructure has vulnerabilities. Implementation of our strategies might sometime give bad guys exposure to attack our system. Let’s take the example of a smartphone manufacturer company called OnePlus. OnePlus is an Android smartphone company whose strategy is to sell phones only from online store to make the smartphone cheaper by reducing the cost of the smartphone by avoiding the physical store. Their strategy is to sell the cheaper smartphone by reducing the operating cost of their business by avoiding any physical store. They started selling phones online but there were vulnerabilities in their payment system. They had announced that up to 40,000 customers credit card information was affected by the security breach and because of this, they need to shut down their payment gateway until the issue is fixed. From this example, we can see that our strategies might have impacted the security of our data and privacy. Therefore, strategies and securities should be considered as two sides of the same coins and we need to do proper research before making plans and strategies for our organization.

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