The Seven Cybersecurity Misconceptions Every CIO Should Dispel

You’ve heard the stories: a large Internet company exposing all three billion of its customer accounts; a major hotel chain compromising 500 million customer records; and one of the big-three credit reporting agencies exposing more than 143 million records, leading to a 25 percent loss in value and a $439 million hit.

At the time, all of these companies had security mechanisms in place. They had trained professionals on the job. They had invested heavily in protection. But the reality is that no amount of investment in preventative technologies can fully eliminate the threat of savvy attackers, malicious insiders, or inadvertent victims of phishing.

Keeping your organization safe from cyberattacks is a never-ending exercise. Enabling the concept of intrinsic security gives you an advantage over attackers, rather than always playing catch-up or defense. Breaches are not just costly and bad for an organization’s reputation; the CIO also has a reputation—and a job—to lose. Intrinsic security doesn’t mean abandoning your investment in existing perimeter and endpoint security solutions. It is an additive step that makes your security posture considerably more robust.