Council Post: Balancing Act: How Enterprises Can Innovate Without Compromising Security

Thai Son Nguyen has spent the last 18 years building a world-class digital transformation and ecommerce service provider through SmartOSC.

Ask anyone who’s managed an enterprise-level organization for any significant length of time and they’ll tell you that in many ways, it’s a balancing act.

A variety of conflicting interests have to be in harmony for the organization to operate at an effective level. I’ve had to balance team members’ desire to achieve their personal goals with what’s good for the company as well as having to balance expenses with revenue, and myriad other things.

For companies like mine in the tech sphere, balancing innovation with security is a mission-critical task.

On the one hand, innovating with your products and services is how a business ensures it has a competitive edge over the rest of the market. On the other hand, moving too quickly can put you at risk of security breaches that can destroy that competitive edge.

Fortunately, there are steps we can take to ensure our organization strikes a balanced approach.

Pitfalls Of Unchecked Innovation

Every business leader wants innovation as it is, after all, crucial to building a moat around your organization. But the savvy leader also sees the dangers posed by unchecked innovation.

Organizations require innovation to succeed, yet “64% of IT leaders believe that cybersecurity concerns are negatively impacting their organization’s willingness to invest in innovative tech. This is perhaps unsurprising as 91% either consider emerging tech a danger or admit to having already experienced a breach because of it,” which shows the dilemma leaders face.

It’s clear that innovation is needed for the organization that wants a chance to compete today, but it can’t be at all costs, and certainly not at the cost of security. The answer to achieving a balance is found in careful assessment—measuring seven times and cutting once.

Our recent conversation with CyberSecurity Malaysia, the national cybersecurity specialist center, highlighted a strategic approach to navigating challenges: balancing security with usability. According to Dato’ Dr. Haji Amirudin, chief executive officer of CyberSecurity Malaysia, organizations should “prioritize practical implementation planning by carefully assessing their needs and constraints.”

Steps To Striking The Balanced Approach

Here are some of the practical steps that I and other leaders have found effective in ensuring innovation and security are well-balanced throughout an organization.

Incremental Change For Productivity

Like many of you reading this, I have at times been tempted to make vast, sweeping changes over my entire business with flashy new tech. Luckily, I’ve never given in, as a better approach is taking change step by step.

Focusing on small yet impactful changes, using tech that’s proven safe, within targeted parts of the organization is a strategic move. This approach allows businesses to test changes before rolling them out more widely or to eliminate the experiment if it proves too risky.

My peers agree. On an episode of my company’s podcast, Dennis Trawnitschek, chief technology officer of SCBX, said, his company is prioritizing “incremental change, which is very important because not all the AI change is going to be big change that’s going to change everything and new business models.”

Balanced Risk Management

I have encountered executives so concerned with ensuring security that they end up stifling innovation. The survey mentioned above found that 64% of IT leaders believe cybersecurity concerns are harming their organization’s willingness to invest in innovative tech.

The solution here is allocating specific resources to innovation (this can include a team, finances or even your own time) while also ensuring you have robust structures in place to protect customer data.

In addition, don’t neglect the need to comply with industry-specific regulations and indeed wider data privacy rules and regulations. Team leaders should be made aware that staying abreast of developments in these areas is crucial to their performance.

Research Partnerships

Rather than keeping the entire burden of innovation within your organization (which can be expensive, monetarily and in terms of man hours), working with a research institute can be a big benefit.

Researchers at an academic institution will typically be happy to work with a company that can provide them with some much-needed resources, while your organization gets the benefit of controlled, sandbox experiments. This means you can test new technologies without putting your security at risk, ensuring innovation without endangering your core operations (read: revenue) or customer privacy.

Cultural Transformation

This final step is harder to quantify but is perhaps the most important of all those mentioned. Turning your organization into one whose culture embraces innovation while ensuring security will create long-lasting benefits.

To do this, I recommend encouraging controlled experimentation from the top. At the same time, remind team leaders that they always have to be mindful of fulfilling their responsibilities towards customers, regulators and legal standards. Doing these should shift the culture of any organization that is too afraid of risk-taking, or is too cavalier, into one that has these two key needs well balanced.

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