From: Harvard Business Review
By J. Yo-Jud Cheng, Boris Groysberg
One of the greatest challenges facing boards today is the one directors feel least prepared for: cybersecurity. Yahoo’s disclosure in December of what could be the largest data breach in history was hardly an isolated incident. Indeed, the Guardian dubbed 2016 the “year of the hack,” and cyberthreats are increasingly common across all sectors.
In previous work we found that cybersecurity ranked as a top political issue for corporate directors, trailing only the economy and the regulatory environment. Directors acknowledge cybersecurity as an urgent global issue, but are failing to make the connection between the pervasiveness of cyberthreats and their companies’ vulnerabilities. When we asked them to describe their levels of concern and readiness for various risks to their companies, cybersecurity took a backseat to worries about regulatory and reputational risks, which directors were more adequately prepared to deal with. Just 38% of directors reported having a high level of concern about cybersecurity risks, and an even smaller proportion said they were prepared for these risks. In the words of one director, “Cybersecurity is a big issue, but there is a broad spectrum of risk in this business, so it is a key factor among several.”
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