Consulting magazine works hand-in-hand with ALM Intelligence Pacesetter Research to provide a platform view of the two-sided market for professional services, providing objective assessments of where innovation is happening in professional services and how that innovation is changing traditional market relationships, creating new competitive threats as well as (for both sellers and buyers) opening new opportunities.
Consulting is pleased to share the following article by Tomek Jankowski, Director, ALM Intelligence Pacesetter Research.
Cybersecurity as Change Agent in Professional Services
Tomek Jankowski, Director, ALM Intelligence Pacesetter Research Cybersecurity is of course topical and will always be, for the rest of our lives and beyond. Increasing connectivity, perhaps best illustrated through the internet of things (IoT), means increasing digital vulnerability. And cyber criminals are exploiting that vulnerability, targeting in 2022 supply chain relationships, medium-sized organizations with fewer cybersecurity resources, and any weak link they can find in an organization's extended digital armor. Just as Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner described narcotics smuggling operations as among the world's most efficient and well-run businesses in their 2005 book Freakonomics, so too are cyber criminals today adapting to the market realities of 2022 with innovations such as third-party ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS).
So what exactly constitutes adequate cybersecurity in 2022? The trends have been clear for years, only accelerated by the pandemic. The cyber criminal world has been on a steady learning curve of cooperation – while their victims mostly have not. Governments are beginning to catch up, which is helpful for organizations but also a challenge in the form of looming new legislation and a more uncertain regulatory environment. All of this is leading to the most effective cybersecurity strategies being those which are most active, continuously proactively identifying potential threats and acting accordingly. AI is increasingly being deployed to both identify threats and instantly formulate a response. Organizations can't play defense with cybersecurity anymore; it must be baked into everything they do, at all times. And like anything in business, if done right, an effective cybersecurity strategy can translate into competitive advantage.
From the professional services provider perspective, what this adds up to is the need to engage clients more. Selling a product or one-off service is no longer enough. Cybersecurity is not a check-list item, it is a constantly evolving exercise in trend analysis, threat detection, incident response, training, compliance, risk management, third party relationship vetting, and long-term strategy development. None of these are static tasks. This has given rise particularly in the last year to a dramatic rise in the utilization of interim staff and capability augmentation services, as well as longer-term managed services and cyber-as-a-service offerings. This may reflect our current moment as organizations gear up for the next level of cybersecurity, but many of the trends driving this have the appearances of being longer-term challenges. Cybersecurity may turn out to be the one client challenge, the "cow-catcher" of client demand that goes the furthest in driving convergence and innovation in professional services. If so, those service providers able to build those longer-term, deeper-engagement collaborative relationships with clients will be the ones we're still writing about in five years.
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