Organizations must invest in three risk disciplines to increase trust and resilience.
Imagine an insurance company whose business model is thoroughly digital. Empowered by customer consent, the company monitors its customers’ activities related to their coverage, communicating with them through various digital channels about behaviors that raise or reduce risk, and thus raise or reduce premiums.
The company functions as both insurer and life advisor with a business model that essentially runs on trust, supported and enabled by extensive technology capabilities, including a wide range of sensors, payment cards and processing systems, and big-data analytics that compare customer activity to risk models. That trust is secured via an extended value chain that includes digital suppliers and their suppliers, many of them beyond the direct control of the company. What happens if that value chain is disrupted by an operational failure, a malicious actor, or governmental intrusion?
Attackers use the same architectures
With IT intrinsic to operations and relationships in the entire digital business value chain, it’s easy to see why 89% of CIOs in the 2015 Gartner CIO Survey said digital business would create new types and levels of risk. Inside and out, enterprises are architected for agility and convenience, not resilience, according to Richard Hunter, vice president and Gartner Fellow. However, the architectures that offer agility and convenience to enterprises and their customers are the same ones attackers use to gain comprehensive access to enterprise systems once they get a foothold anywhere in the extended value chain.
More about the new risks digital business can be read in the article on Smarter With Gartner website.
Mr. Hunter will provide more analysis during the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2015 session, The New Risks of Digital Business.
Gartner Symposium/ITxpo is the world’s most important gathering of CIOs and other senior IT executives. IT executives rely on these events to gain insight into how their organizations can use IT to overcome business challenges and improve operational efficiency.
Upcoming dates and locations for Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2015 include: November 8 – 12, Barcelona, Spain
