COVID-19: Work from anywhere. Cyber everywhere.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced business leaders worldwide to respond with unprecedented speed and efficiency to new ways of working, new ways of innovating, responding, collaborating, transacting…surviving. Now, as organisations begin to plan for a post-pandemic world, they must ask themselves, “how can we make new ways of work productive, sustainable, secure and safe?”

As COVID-19 spread from person-to-person, country to country and beyond, Cyber delivered the integrity and availability of the networks needed to “work from anywhere” and the confidentiality to transact and transform with confidence across geographies.  For the world to continue to thrive in this new remote, virtual environment, even as COVID-19 wanes and surges in various regions, organisations will need to:

• establish a foundation of trust
• adopt a “Cyber Everywhere” mindset
• embrace a culture of perpetual resilience,
• and lead from the front

Many organisations already have determined they will never return to “business as usual” or “business before COVID” because they’ve seen increased productivity from allowing employees to work from home and they want to lock in those benefits. But to thrive in this next normal, organisations need a sound strategy for managing cyber risk. A “Cyber Everywhere” mindset is required. It means understanding the pervasiveness of Cyber and meaningfully embedding it in innovation, strategy and process to ensure that Cyber enables the success of every initiative, allowing organisations to move more quickly, effectively and securely.

In this next normal, the ways we live, work, transact and communicate will be even more interconnected. Companies need to build resilient cyber capabilities to rebound stronger and adapt more quickly to new global crises and cyber threats without losing critical operational function and customer confidence.

The impact of COVID-19 on organisations has created a symphonic opportunity that reinforces a new kind of leadership that prepares for such disruption, again and potentially again. COVID-19, for all its challenges, has also given us the opportunity to remold the new tomorrow.

We will lean on Cyber more than we have ever before from education to customer interaction and transactions, from securing the supply chain to assessing cyber risk in a merger and acquisition (M&A). The responsible, resilient leaders of the future will begin to ask themselves a revised set of questions to help them thrive in that new tomorrow.

Read more about those questions and how organisations can leverage Cyber as the enabler of building trust and resilience among their customers, employees, governments and communities both now and into the future.