Retailers Are Facing an IT Complexity Problem, New Research Finds
Getting to the Root of Cyber Incidents
Too often, IT leaders experience problems but fail to understand the root cause, the report reveals. Whether about IoT connectivity or artificial intelligence, this lack of understanding can also cut into a clear strategy for cyber resilience.
Retailers need to diagnose the issue before they can fix it, Hagopian explains. They can do that by talking with a tech partner for answers, connecting with peers or retracing the steps of a cyber incident.
Sometimes the culprit is an unlikely one. Take, for example, a new tool that is meant to simplify operations but instead causes disruption. “Various departments are purchasing their own technology and tools, so you have to retrofit that back into the central infrastructure and the centralized tooling that has been approved. And then there’s always shadow IT, where an end user could potentially purchase something in a silo,” Hagopian says.
READ MORE: Experts share what cyber resilience means and how to achieve it.
Focus on Mitigating Risks and Reducing Downtime Costs
Retailers know they need to respond to a cybersecurity incident when it happens, but what about defensive planning? This involves identifying the biggest risk and coming up with a plan to mitigate it, Bell says.
Right now, about 8 in 10 of the retail IT leaders surveyed felt at least somewhat prepared for a cybersecurity incident, even with the challenge of integrating legacy tools. For those who felt less prepared, negative consequences such as the cost of operational downtime and the impact on brand reputation may be bigger motivators than, say, data exfiltration or compliance issues, Bell says.
A quarter of respondents had suffered $5 million to $10 million in downtime to their organization after a data breach in the past five years — and that’s on the lower end. “Operational downtime can cost $100 million-plus a week in some scenarios,” Bell says.
These are the kinds of opportunity costs that linger long after an attack. But even more important is the “basic sense of trust that tends to be compromised when a breach occurs,” Bell says.
