BOHH Breakdown 20: Supporting Digital Innovation Without Sacrificing Security

In our last post, we took a closer look at Artificial Intelligence and how it can enhance the cybersecurity industry. Today, we are addressing how to support digital innovations without sacrificing security. 

What makes a company successful? Ask almost any enterprise today and they will tell you that innovation is a critical piece to ensuring long-term success in the current and evolving business environment. The companies that are able to adapt to the ways in which the market is evolving, compete with newer entrants, and even capitalize on the opportunities and possibilities innovation brings, will be the ones to emerge as successful leaders. Since 2000, a significant number of Fortune 500 companies that are no longer trading, as they couldn’t embrace business change.

Innovation can mean a lot of different things, but for today’s purpose, we will focus on digital innovation of new devices, tools and methods to help businesses streamline their operations and communication engagements with customers. As such, cloud services, IoT implementations and chatbots are some of the top digital innovations that are dominating today’s enterprise ecosystem. Adoption of these technologies is exploding across enterprise cloud services. And while every enterprise would agree these channels are good business investments, there are still challenges of these tools opening their systems and users to massive, widespread and malicious security threats.

At BOHH, we believe that innovation should not come at the expense of security and vice versa. While it may be tricky, there is a way to find balance between the two. Below are several recommendations to support integrating digital innovations in to your business strategy without sacrificing security.

1. Consider how these new innovations are handling data before full adoption. Organizations must plan for how the information is stored, how long it’s stored for, how it’s used, and who has access to it on these new channels. This is especially important for highly regulated industries that will deal with sensitive customer information. Perhaps before initiating complete adoption, organizations should consider automating some services using digital innovation tools but still have them working in tandem with human teams to improve the data flow without sacrificing security. 
2. Research thoroughly the digital innovation tools you plan to integrate if you are using a third party.  Many brands are integrating tools such as chatbots and IoT devices that are third-party platforms. While this is a convenient solution, it does mean that the security features are decided by the third party’s own security branch, which means the organization does not have as much control over the security features on the tools they are using to interact with customer data that needs to be protected. If possible, businesses should rely on building their own digital innovation channels from scratch with security built in at the foundation level or working with third party platforms that follow this same rule. Because businesses hold responsibility in keep their data and customers’ data safe, it is important to do a lot of research on the security protocols needed before integrating these tools in to their business strategy.
3. All communication on these new tools should be encrypted and deployed only on encrypted channels. This is something that is relatively easy to set up on an organization’s own website and encryption is a great tool to help keep data protected. However, it is important to note that if the data is not encrypted from end-to-end in the transaction process, it leaves an opening for hackers to get access to that data once they have penetrated your system. End-to-end encryption is key to keeping data encrypted throughout the whole data journey, so the data stays better protected from bad actors no matter what channel it is being stored on or accessed through. 

Hopefully these tips offer some good balance on adding innovative digital tools to your business strategy without compromising security. Come back next week and we will switch gears a bit and talk about the hot topic of cryptocurrency and how to better protect your investments.