‘Trust’ Must Guide Cyber Risk Management During Geopolitical Incidents
Upcoming Forrester keynote: Maintaining customers’ trust, maintaining employees’ trust, and implementing a zero-trust architecture are all essential to the cybersecurity and risk decisions during war and other geo-political crises.
Close operations in one country? Cease business with another? End a relationship with one service provider and rearchitect your IT infrastructure around it? These are the questions executives must answer and act upon in the hours and days following major geopolitical upheavals. Russian missiles hitting Ukraine impact IT leaders on the other side of the globe; and this type of event will be a growing challenge for CIOs, CISOs and their companions in the future. At Forrester’s upcoming Risk and Security Forum -- in Washington D.C. and online Nov 8 and 9 -- analysts will address this. (Those interested in attending Forrester’s Security & Risk Forum, taking place November 8–9, 2022, can register with voucher code FORRIW.)
“When you are evaluating geopolitical risk, when you are making decisions on how to approach geopolitical risk, everything should be looked at through the lens of trust,” says Forrester senior analyst Allie Mellen. “And we find that trust is one of the most important things that businesses can focus on in the next decade.”
When hearing “trust,” many IT professionals will leap to the idea of “zero-trust.” However, Forrester’s definition is not just about technology.
Trust is More Than Tech…
Mellen explains that Forrester’s definition of trust is “confidence in the high probability that a person or organization will spark a specific positive outcome in a relationship.” Levers to obtain trust, they say, include accountability, consistency, competence, dependability, empathy, integrity, and transparency.
During geopolitical unrest, providing this “feel it in your bones,” sense of trust is essential she says. Trust, “is deeply important to human experience, and especially in moments where we experience a lot of change, where we experience a lot of difficult situations. Being able to inspire through trust is really, really powerful.”
Mellen points to all the companies that chose to leave (or not to leave) the Russian market when the war with Ukraine began. Many of these companies had infrastructure and employees in Russia to consider.
“One of the reasons why this is so challenging and why this is going to be such a priority for businesses,” she says, “is that it comes down to, ‘What does your business stand for? What are your values?’ Because your values tie back to everything that you do. So, if you have a strong set of values that you and your organization live by, that needs to be your guiding principle for these types of decisions.
“This is not a situation where you can wait to see which way the wind blows and then go whichever way your customers are telling you to go,” she says. “Not if you want to be seen as a leader in the market, seen as trusted.”