Elevating the Cybersecurity Investment Discussion: May 2023 ‘Cyber Insiders’ CxO Forum

At Adarma we believe we’re better together, which is why we’re taking active steps to develop a community for industry peers to come together to share insights, learnings, and best practices. To realise this goal, we have launched our new ‘Cyber Insiders’ CxO Forum, a gathering where we bring together industry experts, our peers, and customers to explore the most pressing topics pertinent to our industry. Last week we held our second ever ‘Cyber Insiders’ CxO forum where the topic of the day was the need to elevate the discussion about cybersecurity investment.

High-profile cyber-attacks, stricter security regulations, hefty data breach fines and a global pivot to a remote/ hybrid workforce has shone a light on the importance of cybersecurity and brought it to the wider attention of organisations everywhere. In a rapidly growing digital economy, cybersecurity is no longer just a software concern or a job for IT.

Instead, it’s becoming a major topic for company management that goes beyond protecting systems networks and data. Over the past five years, cybersecurity has become equally important to other aspects of the business such as investment and sustainability. Companies are starting to recognise that being able to demonstrate their diligence and investment in cybersecurity can also be a positive non-financial differentiator in the market.

The potentially devastating impact of a cyber-attack e.g. legal repercussions, reputational damage, costly fines from regulating bodies, insurance hikes and business disruptions mean that investors and customers alike are preferring to work with businesses that have a robust and proactive cybersecurity strategy in place. To them it’s a safer bet to engage with companies that are cyber aware with security measures, controls and contingency plans in place.

For those reasons, we need to elevate the discussion around cyber investment and change how it shows up at a board level and across the rest of the business. Increasingly sophisticated threat actors and a thriving cybercrime underworld is making it an imperative that we move beyond the out-dated perception of cyber investment as a necessary box-ticking/compliance exercise. We need to start thinking of cybersecurity investment as a core business consideration that can bring a whole host of benefits that support the company in its objectives.

Over the course of the day, our speakers examined how we can drive a cultural mind-shift and bring about that elevation to make the discussion one that focuses on the tangible value cybersecurity investment can deliver to the wider business, whilst keeping cyber threat actors at bay.

On the day, we held an industry panel hosted by our CEO John Maynard featuring Paul Midian, CISO at easyJet and Liz Banbury, CISO at Hiscox who discussed how cybersecurity must be about more than just cyber defence, and practical steps to create it as a value driver in organisations.

Dan Baker, our Chief Delivery Officer then hosted an interactive session discussing the preliminary findings from our recent research study (coming soon!) that we have commissioned titled ‘The Truth about Security Operations in the UK Market’.

Dr Mandy Haeburn-Little, Chair of Business Resilience International Management (BRIM) then presented on the rollout of nine cyber resilience centres in the UK designed to support national policing efforts in the fight against cybercrime on SME targets.

To conclude the day, our CMO Jo Gilhooley hosted an interview with Stephanie Itimi, CEO of SEDIA, a social enterprise with an incredible ambition of supporting 100,000 BAME women access a career in cybersecurity by 2040!

This was a wonderful and insightful event; it provided a fantastic opportunity for knowledge sharing and sparking dynamic conversations. We would like to extend a big thank you to everyone who participated in this event, especially our amazing speakers. We are extremely excited for our next forum and look forward to welcoming more thoughts and ideas to the conversation.

Here is a video compilation of the day’s highlights, we hope you enjoy it!