In his book Swim with the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive, Harvey B. Mackay writes: “He who burns his bridges better be a darn good swimmer.” This is not just great advice for a sales rep looking to build relationships and a strong pipeline, it is also a maxim for every marketing professional responsible for creating a great experience for their customers and prospects in this increasingly digital world. That means that understanding who gets into personalized marketing and customer portals can mean the difference between success and making the next headline for a breach. That means that more than just the CISO should understand the implications of cybersecurity in 2020.
Cybersecurity In 2020
A lot of publications and independent bloggers are publishing their 2020 predictions for cybersecurity. Instead of trying to reproduce the wheel, we thought it would just be easier to recommend one of the better articles for your consideration. Dan Lohrman has a GovTech blog titled “Lohrman on Cybersecurity & Infrastructure” and published his “The Top 20 Security Predictions for 2020” which we think you should check out. And by you, we don’t just mean the typical Chief Information Security Officer or IT Security professional, we also believe others in the C-Suite should take notice.
CMOs Should Care About Cybersecurity
The Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) is responsible for the image, thought leadership and brand reputation of their organization. So when a cybercriminal does something to impact that brand reputation, it is their responsibility, not the CISO, who will have to handle the repairs.
CISO Mag offers these six observations on why CMOs should be aware of cybersecurity issues, educated on the proper techniques and conscious to address specific controls in their marketing strategies:
- “About 22 percent of consumer product companies have CMOs, and most of them are getting engaged in the field of the cyber risk management team. There are many IP which can be stolen and can impact brand equity and its future. Vendors’ security is one of the most critical programs. CMO must not, in any case, leave a loophole.
- CMOs must examine all touchpoints within their consumer acquisition. Every marketing process deals with very sensitive data that must be stored with prior responsibility. CMOs must coordinate with the chief information security officer to ensure that there is no weakness at any stage of the marketing process. The CMOs should have excellent communicative skills with the IT department to check the security from time to time.
- CMOs should be champion in the creation and ongoing development of an integrated policy that ensures the latest security protocols implementation. They play an integral part in ensuring employees are well aware and educated on the best security practices of their company.
- If by any chance, an attacker manages to bypass necessary protection the company has implemented, CMOs’ first action will be to inform the IT department. CMOs are likely to instantly inform its customers about the situation while guiding them on how they will improve security shortly.
- A security breach can massively hamper the brand identity if a breach takes place; the trustworthiness of that brand diminishes and impacts the brand image. CMO provides a pivotal role in ensuring all the investors and trusted consumers by emphasizing them through word of mouth.
- Education is the key to protect your brand. Companies that have been victims of malicious cyber-attack must learn from previous experiences. CMO can hire a security consultant to provide specialized knowledge that can save money as well as the brand reputation.”
While CMOs do rely on their CISO counterparts for cybersecurity, it doesn’t excuse their requirement to understand the implications of the bigger security picture. Ultimately, they will be held to uphold the company’s reputation (and fix it if damaged), so an ounce of prevention will always be worth a pound of cure.
Yes, CMOs Need Continuous Behavioral Authentication As Much As CISOs
Most public and customer facing technologies are budgeted under the CMO and as such, the CMO needs to be conscious that authentication of who is actually getting in and what they are doing will ultimately impact their brand reputation if the wrong people do the wrong things. Therefore, CMOs should mandate the use of continuous behavioral authentication to establish an immutable identity access management frontend to their marketing and customer facing portals.
Acceptto’s eGuardian engine continuously creates, and monitors user behavior profiles based on the user interaction with the It’sMe authenticator. Every time an activity occurs, actionable intelligence is gathered and used to optimize the user profile. eGuardian is capable of autonomously and continually learning new policies and adapting existing ones. While policies can still be manually defined and contribute to the computation, our Biobehavioral AIML approach automatically finds the optimal policy for each transaction. eGuardian leverages a mixture of AI & ML, expert systems and SMEs to classify, detect, and model behavior, and assign real-time risk scores to continuously validate your identity prior to, during and post-authentication.
Download the Enterprise Management Associates’ Ten Priorities For Identity Management in 2019 today and then check out what Acceptto can do to ensure your employees, partners and customers can authenticate without passwords and still ensure security and privacy registering for a free demo today.
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