Several large enterprises have been victimized by catastrophic cyber security incidents over the past few years. They’re so severe, they even caused executives to resign and profits to disappear. In the wake of these high-profile incidents, the media’s message has been clear: if organizations with nearly unlimited resources can be compromised, data breaches are inevitable for nearly every organization; in fact, many have likely been breached already and simply do not know it.

But that narrative does not tell the whole story. It is true that the threat landscape has made it essentially impossible for organizations to keep every threat out. The days when simply buying the best firewall on the market served as a comprehensive security strategy are gone—forever.

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But although the sheer volume of attacks means that some number of breaches are inevitable, with the right people, processes and technology in place, a resulting crisis is far from a foregone conclusion. In other words, there is no need for blind panic.

So what does this mean for organizations? What changes do they need to make to adapt to information security challenges? The first step is a change in mindset—businesses must assume a breach will occur. Before an organization begins to think about what tools to adopt or strategies to implement, it must first shift its mindset from “assumption of protection” to “assumption of breach.”

In this blog series, we will discuss how that change in philosophy can help shape an effective organizational cyber security strategy. We will also detail how adopting a layered approach to security that focuses on turning your people, processes and technology from vulnerabilities to strengths can help an organization achieve positive outcomes such as:

• Vastly reducing the number of breaches, often by several orders of magnitude
• Protecting critical systems, applications and data
• Avoiding costly downtime
• Retaining customer confidence and protecting brand reputation
• Avoiding the consequences of failing to comply with industry regulations

There are vendors out there who will tell you that you can protect yourself completely from breaches—I won’t. And I will also be honest with you in saying that protecting your organization in this threat landscape is not easy.   But, it is not impossible either.

I encourage you to read the rest of this blog series where we discuss how you can implement a strategy that allows your business to operate confidently and without fear:

• Assumption of Breach, Part II – The People Element
• Assumption of Breach, Part III – Policy & Process
• Assumption of Breach, Part IV – Technology

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