Cybersecurity for the C-Suite in 2023

Strategic Cybersecurity Challenges for the C-Suite

Forgive me for stating the obvious, but your organization's cybersecurity performance can significantly impact revenue, brand, and stock price. The goal of this blog is not to perpetuate fear-mongering. The goal is to acknowledge that cybersecurity is part of your business differentiation and can be used to create a strategic advantage. According to the PwCs Global Digital Trust Insights Survey of over 1,700 directors and C-suite executives, they prioritize cybersecurity to create strategic and competitive differentiation.

• Establish a Cyber Mindset - C-suite executives and their teams need to establish a company-wide security policy, communications, and validation program to drive requirements across the leadership team to infuse a security mindset across the organization.
• Drive Revenue Growth - According to Gartner, by 2025, organizations will use cybersecurity risk as a primary determinant in conducting transactions and business engagements. CROs and CMOs state that supply-chain trust and data privacy are keys to capturing and retaining customers.
• Protect Market Capitalization - A study of breached companies revealed they had underperformed in the market, and after three years, their average share price had declined by over 15 percent. Cyber breaches create doubt with regulators, investors, and customers that can adversely impact share prices and new customer acquisition.
• Ensure Brand Protection - According to Gartner, through 2023, government regulations requiring organizations to provide consumer privacy rights will cover five billion citizens worldwide and govern more than 70 percent of the global GDP. Data privacy is a core consumer concern and a significant issue in protecting brand reputation and supporting ESG initiatives.
• Cyber Insurance Strategy - Cyber Insurance providers continue to increase security standards, driving premiums up and reducing coverage. According to Marsh, cyber insurance pricing rose significantly in Q2 2022, 79 percent in the U.S. and 68 percent in the UK. In Merck's case, many insurers believe that attacks like the 2017 “Not Petya” ransomware are “acts of war” and are not covered. This is just the beginning of a significant change in the cyber insurance industry that will impact the risk management calculus for every company.

Operational Challenges for the C-Suite

Cybersecurity is not just about protecting your operations but will become a core strategic differentiator. According to Gartner, by 2025, organizations will use cybersecurity risk as a primary determinant in conducting transactions and business engagements. Here are the core factors that define the state of cybersecurity in 2023:

• National Cybersecurity Policies - We continue to have nations and multi-national organizations step-up cyber security requirements. The new U.S. National Cybersecurity Strategy was one of the most significant policy changes. This will change not only your operational cybersecurity requirements it could impact your products and services.
• Cybersecurity Stack Complexity - Security stacks are complex and complicated, and organizations must find ways to simplify and consolidate them to optimize protection. Gartner indicates that 80 percent of organization actions are executing or interested in a strategy for vendor consolidation and greater efficiency.
• Growing Global Governance - Virtually every government entity has issued new regulatory requirements. A few recent examples include: public companies now have expanded cybersecurity disclosure rules (SEC), a new presidential executive order (EO 14028) which requires enhanced cybersecurity, supply-chain rules such as (CMMC) require vendors to prove security resilience, data privacy laws continue to expand, and regulations are growing globally.
• Human Factors - Threat actors attack people first. According to the 2022 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, 82 percent of all data breaches involve a human element. The combination of remote work and AI-driven phishing/malware attacks will continue to grow due to a lack of training and increased threat actor sophistication.
• Cyber Skills Gap - According to ISC², over 3.4M cyber jobs are unfilled globally and will require a combination of investments in recruiting, training, and outsourcing cyber skills. Organizations not investing in cyber skills development will be short-staffed and pay twice as much to consulting providers.

The Cyber Force Platform Delivers Solutions to these Challenges

Every task and role that demands complex interactions between people, processes, and technology is improved and optimized by one thing. They practice in some form of a simulator to prepare for live production environments. This is why the U.S. Cyber Command, four of the top five U.S. banks, and Wall Street banks (SIFMA’s Quantum Dawn) have used SimSpace’s Cyber Force Platform to simulate their cyber environments and conduct live-fire exercises to test and train their cyber teams, validate their cyber stack effectiveness, gather decision-making analytics, drive continuous security improvements, and to answer the most challenging cybersecurity questions.

SimSpace Platform Capabilities

The SimSpace Cyber Force Platform helps organizations deal with critical problems, including complexity, staffing, and regulatory issues. The SimSpace Cyber Force Platform is the preferred cyber range of the U.S. Cyber Command. The SimSpace Cyber Force Platform delivers military-grade cyber ranges, elite cybersecurity training, and live-fire exercises to prepare the organization's teams, processes, and technology for real-life cyber attacks.

• High-Fidelity Cyber Range. The cyber range provides high-fidelity replications of any cyber environment, including on-prem, cloud, remote/edge, OT, IOT, IoT, and ICS.
• Continuous Security Improvements. Benchmark your security posture and develop a measurable program to improve people, processes, and technology.
• Cybersecurity Stack Optimization. Leverage objective data to identify redundancies, optimize effectiveness and efficiency, and maximize the ROI of cyber investments.
• Guaranteed-Safe Simulation Environments. Simulate any cybersecurity environment on our cyber range to run live-fire exercises without risk to production deployments.
• Live-Fire Exercises. Comprehensive live-fire exercise to test your systems under real-world hyper-realistic via Red/Blue/Purple and CTF team events.
• Advanced User and Attack Emulations. SimSpace provides the most advanced user emulations to create hyper-realistic attack event environments.
• Elite Cyber Team Training. Investing in individual and team training expands the talent pool for cybersecurity roles and improves the retention of existing talent.
• Prove cybersecurity ROI. By leveraging a platform that provides in-depth strategic exercises and performance metrics, companies can evaluate the response of their people, processes, and technology to a real-world cyberattack — without real-world consequences. This capability makes it easier for management, boards, and executives to measure and augment their cyber readiness by making more informed investments.

Business Impact

Adopting a cyber range has a significant business impact by helping companies identify weaknesses in their cybersecurity defense and allowing them to address these gaps proactively. Customers using The SimSpace Cyber Force Platform found they were able to:

• Quantifiable Cyber Range Benefits
• 30% Savings on security operation spending and security tools
• 40% Reduction in configuration-related breaches
• 45% Improvement in breach prevention and reduced incident response times
• 48% Improvement in breach detection and mitigation times
• 56% Improvement in cyber team retention and skills development
• Validate your cyber posture
• Enable you and your teams to be challenged, learn to work together, find gaps, and know where improvements, training, and changes are required.
• Train and retain a team of elite cyber professionals
• Seamlessly build individual and team cybersecurity training into your workload with tailored learning experiences.
• Get cyber answers for auditors, executives, regulatory governance, and insurers
• Pass audits with data, solve governance that protects brand reputation, and lower cyber insurance premiums.