Beyond Cybersecurity: Protecting Your Digital Business

Preface

Progress for the world economy depends on tens of trillions of dollars in value being created from digitization over the next decade. Institutions are moving from having pockets of automation to using pervasive connectivity, massive analytics, and low-cost scalable technology platforms to achieve fundamentally different levels of customer intimacy, operational agility, and decision-making insight. In banking, this means opening accounts and approving mortgages in minutes rather than days or weeks. In insurance, better underwriting and fairer pricing based on massive analytics. In airlines and hotels, it means more transparency and less hassle for travelers.

When “everything is digital,” private, public, and civil institutions become more dependent on information systems. In such a hyperconnected world, online and mobile capabilities increase these institutions’ vulnerability to attack by sophisticated cyber-criminals, political “hacktivists,” nation-states, and even their own employees. As a result, the success of continued digitization hinges on consumers and companies trusting that financial records, patient data, and intellectual property will remain confidential, valid, and available when required in the face of increasingly determined cyber-attacks.

Protecting institutions from cyber-attacks is therefore critical to continued economic development, which led the World Economic Forum and McKinsey to collaborate to raise the visibility of cybersecurity among C-suite ...