CariSec Global Inc.’s awareness campaign for Cybersecurity Month draws upon a wide range of mature operations in all security domains, helping varying sectors raise the awareness needed to build business resilience through digital operational resilience.

As emerging technologies enhance and provide the efficiencies needed to be competitive and innovative globally, timed service deliveries and stakeholder engagement and well-being are not just essential, but integral to continuous business success and mission achievement. While such technologies create emerging opportunities and markets, they also create emerging risks that can cause devastating business risks that can not only hurt a company’s reputation but can also create varying liabilities in the law courts due to digital premises liabilities. These emerging risks affect digital trust and create distrust in the safety and security of technologies, services and products.

Major breaches worldwide have demonstrated that security cannot remain stagnant but must be continuously monitored and improved, thereby making security programs effective and valuable to the business context. This is crucial for building digital trust and complying with international information security standards to reduce cyber risks. This is essential to reduce or prevent security incidents, such as horrific breaches, that can affect stakeholders’ safety and lives, including future relationships.

The management of emerging risks due to digital transformation, including ordinary cyber risks, requires a risk-based approach to all organisational risks at the governance level, where awareness through risk monitoring and risk management policies can be applied and developed, implementing risk-management throughout the organisation as a process integrated into business processes, functions and services.

Understanding the risk-based approach as an essential process to reduce cyber risks, the planning, designing, implementing, operating, managing, monitoring, and continuous improvement of security controls can be achieved. This ongoing improvement not only reduces cyber risks but also enhances and matures the business’s operational resilience management program, instilling confidence in the efficacy and efficiency of security controls.

The following are top-level business concerns in building operational resilience management (ORM) maturity:

• An ORM program aligned to the organisation’s context—Understanding the business landscape, including its threat landscape, is crucial for the program’s efficacy and efficiency.
• Leadership and Commitment to the ORM program—An essential and supporting aspect in setting the tone and culture of the organisation for ORM.
• Resilience governance —Provides clear direction and defined roles, visibility into operational performance and risks, fosters collaboration, improves organisational efficiency, and, most importantly, supports accountability.
• Effective Business Assessment—Supporting the initial phases of risk assessment and business impact analysis for true and thorough business risk operational awareness for control development and management, thereby improving and enhancing resilience.
• Building the Organizational Resilience Culture—This occurs through the development of supported communications strategies, awareness training, certified training, and mechanisms for cultivating resilience behaviours.
• Assessment and Continuous improvement—Support the necessary tools to provide high-level insights into the program’s performance through comprehensive monitoring and measurement of KPIs and KRIs, presented through a strategic dashboard. This aids in informed decisions and ensures the organisation’s resilience posture (maturity).

Building business resilience through digital operational resilience involves essential activities to strengthen the organisation’s digital trust responsibilities within its business landscape. This includes enhancing stakeholder engagement and involvement while keeping them safe and secure from security threats. Corporate governance’s ethical, social, and political responsibilities have never been more critical than in this digital transformation age. It requires commitment and true leadership to ensure safe and secure operations, processes, functions, products and services delivered in a digitally transformed world.