Cybersecurity is one of the biggest hurdles to progress and digital transformation for companies. Naturally, with new technologies comes new vulnerabilities, which companies can find difficult to navigate especially in new cloud environments.
Legally, cybersecurity designers have to follow strict regulations such as HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) and other laws to protect sensitive information that businesses may possess of their clients.
However, companies that can navigate this system and use their information effectively can more than double their profitability.
Security is a focal point for the future, but it doesn’t have to be the end-all-be-all for companies’ progress and transformation. Companies can not only evolve with technology but stay ahead of the curve and use it effectively. Here are three ways to prevent your company’s security needs from halting the digital transformation of your organization.
Security is Where the Cloud is
The future of security lies in the “cloud,” an ambiguous term that much implies your data is stored invisibly in the sky somewhere. The cloud refers to software and services that run on the internet rather than on your computer’s hard drive.
Data is stored and accessed over the internet (on someone’s server) rather than locally, which can make some companies nervous. The worry or nervousness can prevent businesses from jumping into the next generation of security.
Putting trust in the cloud means trusting that the data will be accessible at all times.
Unlimited accessibility is possible, but it can cost a pretty penny, especially as the companies providing the service can charge for things such as bandwidth.
Trusting the cloud also means trusting the companies providing cloud storage services, which many companies have trouble doing. Big corporations such as Amazon, provide cloud storage services to thousands of smaller companies. The companies can run the risk of outages that can last for hours.
Intellectual property issues can also be an issue with cloud storage. Your business and companies that provide cloud storage solutions may have riffs over who owns the data since they’re the ones storing it. This can depend on where the data was created (locally or in the cloud), and what verbiage is used in the terms of service agreement.
Reasons why companies may not want to implement cloud solutions.
However, cloud computing and cloud-based storage solutions are the future. Local storage is limited, but the storage capacity of the cloud is almost unlimited. Almost constant improvement in cloud services means an improvement in the security of data and infrastructures involved in cloud computing. Cloud security can offer reduced costs since the need to invest in dedicated hardware is eliminated. Reputable cloud service providers eliminate manual security configurations.
Familiarizing with the Cloud can help your organization operate at scale, reduce the costs of technology, use flexible systems that can give the company a competitive edge, and keep moving toward the future.
Tokenization is a Secure Digital Transformation
Tokens are a subject that not a lot of companies have heard of, but can definitely benefit from. A digital token is a digital representation of an asset or right. The asset can be a stock, bond, or real-estate.
The digital token can also represent the rights you have to access a form of data. With security tokens, you can have ownership of the asset, and investors in this asset are protected. Security tokens are useful for private securities.
The security token can often be confused with a utility token, which is when the Howey Test is used to differentiate the two.
The Howey Test is a test made by the Supreme Court that may determine if a transaction qualifies as an investment contract. This test asks if the asset is an investment of money, if it’s in a common enterprise, if there’s an expectation of profits, and if the asset comes from the expectations of others. If the asset passes this test, it can legally be considered a security token.
Security tokens are useful for companies to pay dividends and share and generate profits for token holders.
Paper-backed assets have a liquidity problem, but the cryptographic representation of assets takes care of that issue. By utilizing security tokens, businesses can represent their assets with a simple, government-regulated token. They are rather underutilized at the moment, but as more individuals and companies become interested in owning tokenized versions of assets, security tokens show a lot of promise.
Allocate Funding for Cybersecurity
Ironically, businesses can be held back from progress because they don’t know how much money to spend on cybersecurity. Cybersecurity threats have been dramatically increasing for several years, and data breaches are more common than they were ten years ago.
Cyber threats and data breaches are now considered the norm rather than the exception. Threats such as these have made big businesses to increase spending on defense and cybersecurity, but several firms still underspend on their cyber defenses.
Most firms have the most basic forms of cybersecurity, such as firewalls and antivirus. This may have been enough in the old days, but cybersecurity threats today are much more sophisticated and require more evolved forms of protection.
Authentication, encryption, and digital signatures can all help organizations protect their data from cyber threats, and it’s incredibly important that businesses invest in these to prevent costly breaches.
Investing in protection from breaches can be costly, but the chaos that ensues from data breaches when cybersecurity is not taken seriously can be more costly than their preventive measures.
Spending money on these needs now can prevent companies from having to pause operations to fix mistakes from malware, phishing, ransomware, and other forms of data breaches. In this way, the digital transformation of an organization can continue without needing to worry too much about cyber threats.
In the End
The digital transformation of an organization can be slowed down or even halted in the event of a cybersecurity threat.
Knowing how to evolve with the changing cybersecurity industry through cloud computing, tokenizations, and allocating funding for cybersecurity are just three of the dozens of ways to prevent a company from being left behind in its digital transformation.
Image Credit: Andrea Piacquadio; Pexels
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