Cyber security transformation

The challenge for security is growing

Cyber attacks and breaches are becoming increasingly common, impactful and costly for organisations, putting them under pressure to rapidly improve their cyber security - and at scale. Organisations are also more dependent upon technology than ever before, while emerging trends such as artificial intelligence (AI) pose both opportunities and risks. At the same time, regulation across industries is putting more scrutiny on cyber security and resilience.

Cyber security transformation enables you to address these challenges, so you can rapidly reduce your risk, position yourself to securely enable the business to innovate and grow, and satisfy your obligations to regulators.

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Attack surface Business trend Risk
Artificial intelligence (AI) Hyperscalers and major platform providers are rapidly developing and making AI services available for organisations to disruptively innovate and transform their business processes. AI creates new and significant ways of organisation data to be lost or compromised, as well as new opportunities for attackers to seek to harm organisations and overcome defences.
Supply chain The extended network is growing, increasing collaboration and joint ventures with business partners to develop digital-centric customer experiences. More connections with external parties which can be exploited to steal data or disrupt customer services.
Remote working The workforce is evolving, with more users connected remotely than ever before, anywhere in the world and using any device. Access and exfiltration of sensitive data due to poorly managed credentials and weak authentication mechanisms.  
Internet of things (IoT) Organisations are modernising the way they work by adopting internet-enabled devices that can provide telemetry data to support and monitor specific business use cases.  Use of connected IoT devices increases both the proliferation of unmanaged sensitive data and vulnerability to large scale, multi-vector fifth generation cyber attacks.   
Digital channels Innovation and redesign of traditional digital platforms are transforming the customer experience, improving the ability to reach new consumers and offer more services online. More online touchpoints with customers and business partners serving increasingly rich and valuable data which can be targeted to steal or manipulate such data. 
Cloud The organisation is accelerating its adoption of public cloud hosted services to improve agility and innovation. Core business workload is increasingly hosted on cloud infrastructure which, if poorly configured, can be compromised to steal data or disrupt critical services. 

Benefits of cyber security transformation

Reduce risk

Rapidly reduce your exposure to evolving cyber threats which can materially impact your operations and damage your reputation.

Embrace digital and innovate with confidence

Secure your new digital assets and the critical customer information they process without slowing down your pace of innovation.

Manage cost

Secure your organisation and protect your customers in an increasingly complex business ecosystem at a price you can afford.

Improve operational resilience

Build a technology enterprise that can withstand cyber attacks or rapid shifts in ways of working without compromising on security.

Accelerate your journey to regulatory compliance

Establish focus and bring collective momentum across your organisation to meeting regulatory requirements against the tough timelines.

Our approach to cyber security transformation

Security leaders are under pressure to not only reduce risks now, but also ensure security improvements are sustainable and help prepare their organisation for future threats and opportunities.

Our approach consists of seven components:

Number one

Steer and guide: Insights and awareness of transformation outcomes, benefits, costs, risks, and progress. Risks and costs can be rapidly managed, and the programme agile to respond to change and pressures to maximise value.

Number two

Rapid risk reduction: An agile ‘find and fix’ security workstream using purple team principles starts delivering risk reduction in the first two weeks. Fixes are applied immediately and managed through JIRA workflow.

Number three

Tactical remediation packages: Due to the complexity of the environment and large IT debt, some of the problems found by the purple team are not simple ‘fixes’. This is when a focused tactical time-bound (e.g. 60 day) initiative is required.

Number four

Strategic initiatives: While purple team and tactical work packages are ‘fixing backwards’, strategic projects are aimed at addressing the root cause of the issue and building a sustainable capability to ensure the risk is managed.

Number five

Managed services: We bring our Managed Cyber Services to enable you to rapidly onboard enterprise scale and quality services as either immediate strategic solutions or as stop-gaps, reducing risk but not limiting your decision on future direction.

Number six

Change and adoption: Integration of cultural change and business change as part of the cyber transformation. Transformation often brings change in technology, working practices and organisational structure. These need to be properly adopted and embedded.

Number seven

Augment capacity: Provide business-as-usual (BAU) architecture services and other targeted expert augmentation to enable you to accommodate delivering major transformation, which can put considerable burden on your current resources and capacity to support and collaborate.

Transformation mobilisation services

Security assessment

Rapidly assess and benchmark cyber security capabilities, identify gaps, understand exposure to cyber risks, and construct a programme of work to effectively reduce those risks.

Security strategy and business case

Define a forward-looking and sustainable security strategy and roadmap in line with business and IT objectives, covering risk, regulatory, cost, resilience and innovation agendas. 

Security operating model

Define the services, organisation and governance models required to sustain an effective security posture and realise the benefits from a security transformation.

Security architecture

Our security architecture services help organisations build measures that protect their operations while supporting their business goals. Guided by our overarching security architecture framework, our team will support you in the development, review and implementation of security architecture principles, patterns and security design methodologies.

Programme planning

Structure and plan a programme of work that delivers a combination of quick-win tactical enhancements and long term strategic solutions that supports both the cyber security agenda and is sensitive to the needs and capacity for change within the business.

Transformation execution services

Programme management

Define, track and report progress and benefits realised from a cyber security transformation programme.

Rapid risk reduction

Our rapid risk reduction service provides an enhanced approach to purple teaming, combining red team, blue team and technical project management expertise to find and fix security vulnerabilities as soon as they are identified.  

Managed cyber defence (MCD)

Our MCD service provides advanced cyber defence against both commodity threats and targeted attacks by focusing around the four key stages of prevention, detection, response and hunting. We provide sophisticated defences across the IT environment (including endpoint, network and cloud) to prevent breaches, reduce cyber risk, support compliance, and help meet the strict breach detection and reporting requirements from regulations such as GDPR and NIS.

Find out more

Digital identity

Secure the digital identities that power your digital services and control access to your systems. Digital identity security enables you to manage human and non-human identities and their access within your IT and operational technology (OT) environments. It ensures the right identities can access the right resources at the right times, in the right way and for the right reasons - while keeping hackers and other malicious users at bay.

We provide best in class digital identity advisory, implementation and managed services that enable you to better deliver and optimise your digital business services and processes.

Find out more

Cyber risk management

Identify, quantify and report cyber risk based on three key design principles: business impact, cyber threat landscape and cyber security capabilities.  

Cyber security culture and board awareness

We can help improve cyber security behaviours and transform security culture across your organisation. This includes working with senior leaders to assess their awareness of cyber security and prepare them for how to respond to a potentially high-profile attack. We can also identify and mitigate insecure practices to help reduce cyber risks.

Cyber resilience

Build up the ability to prepare for, respond to and recover from cyber attacks, by defining and shaping security capabilities and controls in modern complex environments.

Benefits of a broader IT transformation

Cyber security transformation is recommended when your priorities are rapid risk reduction and regulatory compliance. However, a broader IT transformation may be more suitable when there are also other priorities around cost and agility.

During a cyber security transformation, organisations typically adopt new technologies faster than they remove legacy IT. This leads to an increase in the attack surface as there are more systems for attackers to target, along with a continuing increase in security investment to achieve the organisation’s desired level of risk reduction.

There comes a point when there is a compelling case for a broader IT transformation, which enables you to reduce costs and risk by removing legacy IT systems. This makes your organisation inherently more resilient and gives you confidence to focus on innovating your business operations and customer experience.

Get in touch with us to access our invitation-only client microsite for a detailed view of our assets and experience in cyber security transformation.

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Contact us

Alex Petsopoulos

Alex Petsopoulos

Cyber Security Partner, PwC United Kingdom

Tel: +44 (0)7941 454210

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