Do you really know what’s being done with your data? From the tracking permissions we happily handover to the likes of Facebook and Netflix, to the business information we work with on company systems, there’s sometimes an apathy about data that makes it harder to protect.

At work or play we’re constantly connected and endlessly accessing, sharing, creating, editing or sending digital information. Being awash in all that online activity has made us simultaneously more productive, but less aware of how data is tracked, captured, analyzed and stored.

The ongoing shift to digital business models turns data desensitization into serious concern. If we’re blasé about sharing photos of our children with strangers on social media, or giving up personal details in exchange for free WiFi, how seriously are we taking the cyber security policies of our employers?

It’s that mundane, everyday reality of cyber risk which makes it so essential to factor cyber security into every aspect of digital transformation. Straight from the start of the IT planning process we need to build in assumptions about persistent security threats emanating from inside and outside the organization.

Not to point fingers or blame, but to ensure that cyber is there to catch us when human error or simple negligence leave us and our data exposed to mis-use.

Are organizations forgetting security in the rush to digitally transform?

I think cyber has been looked at or delivered almost in isolation in the past. Now it has to be part and parcel of existence for every enterprise. Cyber is so important to every activity for our clients, for our employees, for everything we are doing with data across the whole landscape, so I think security needs to be synonymous with every organization’s existence.

Cyber should be the common thread through our cloud deployments

We are all under mass external cyber-attack from criminals and nation-state actors, which means there is a huge cost of execution. Security has to be a silver thread woven into everything we do to ensure that our cloud journeys are effectively delivered, and that in our desire to be the fastest to market for all our client environments, we don’t leave gaping holes behind us which can be exploited.

Switching people on to cyber risk

I think people would care about their data if they knew they could monetize it. It may be my personal opinion but if you were aware that you could profit from interactions with your data, you would be far more likely to want to own it and know every time someone touched it. If every time your data was resold or reshared, you took a percentage, you would care about its storage and care about its location.

Managing the insider threat

If we accept change and the rate at which its happening, that’s fabulous. But I think people are not questioning their interaction with the applications and the data and the companies they work with enough. I think we switch our mind off to some of those concerns and to some of those challenges. It’s only when we really look at them in detail we see the actual underlying challenges.

View our full interview with James as part of our Security Begins Here series.

#SecurityBeginsHere