When communicating with a board or cross-functional teams, a strategy needs to be clear, concise, and aligned with broader business objectives. The focus is to a large degree driven by personal beliefs and priorities of you as a responsible executive. Once you align your priorities with stakeholders, you can start building a change programme down to your cyber defense operations.

A cyber defense strategy is a structured approach that translates technical security capabilities into business value and risk management. It should address three key questions:

1. Where are we now?

2. Where do we want to be?

3. How will we get there?

Answers to the first question don't change too much and would only slowly evolve as a result of short-term projects and changes in the cyber defense functions.

The same holds for the second question unless there is a business-changing event that causes the company to rethink its priorities. This can result from internal pressures or the arrival of a new cybersecurity executive, you taking on a new challenge. You have mapped out your new position, team, and efforts, and you are ready to define a new approach to make a positive impact on the company’s capabilities.

If you're allowed to change the methodology to measure your new team's cyber defense capabilities, you are likely to come up with a new list of priorities for "Where do we want to be".

The answers to this question should be structured and tangible. Whilst cyber defense is primarily internal "affair", companies are able to align it with business objectives and even make it part of their competitive positioning.

Some aspects of cyber defense would impact all your technology teams and ability to communicate your priorities and intended initiatives early on should be our first step. If technology projects are outsourced, cyber defense may become the only "gate" where your company enforces its "technology" policies.

In our experience, pro-active communication of your intended changes have a massively positive impact on how you will deliver on your intentions. Establishing technology forums where IT teams can raise concerns, feedback on your technology changes and discuss challenges connects you with non-cyber teams and create necessary momentum.

With application and platform teams understanding intended security changes, you can create realistic assessments of:

• Business impact, not just technical details - integrating related changes into IT roadmaps limits negative impact and additional costs.

• Clear ROI and risk reduction - ROI may be limited to your budget but if your plans include transparent protections that can be delivered centrally, you may be able to have positive impact on the cost and timelines of other projects with direct impact on your company's business.

• Actionable insights for decision-makers - many managers tend to push "policies" down to engineers without fully understanding daily challenges faced by teams actually delivering revenue-generating applications. Getting engineers to comment on your plans early makes your ability to execute required changes realistic.

Cyber Strategy Objectives

Let's have a look at how you can start phrasing your strategic goals. Based on industry observations, some of the most common combinations of cyber strategy objectives include the following (along with a list of the most common environments and company types):

1. Risk reduction and compliance— as you would expect, these goals are most relevant to sectors with external regulation.

   • Banks and financial services

   • Healthcare providers and insurers

   • Government contractors

   • Critical infrastructure operators

   • Large public companies common thread: heavy regulation and high-value assets to protect

2. Resiliency and technology enhancement—these goals are relevant to technology-heavy, innovative, and lean (in terms of operational costs) companies.

   • Software companies

   • Cloud service providers

   • E-commerce platforms

   • Digital service providers

   • Tech startups Common thread: technology is core to business model

3. Maturity Progression with Cultural Transformation - You are likely to prioritize these aspects in established companies that have outgrown security models and protections built to already scaled-up operations over 10 years ago, often using on-premises technologies.

   • Traditional companies undergoing digital transformation

   • Manufacturing moving to Industry 4.0

   • Retail chains expanding to omnichannel

   • Professional service firms digitalizing operations

   • Common thread: transitioning from legacy to digital operations

4. Compliance and Cultural Awareness - Cultural awareness is prioritized in organizations with a high proportion of non-technical or “customer-facing” employees.

   • Professional service firms (law, consulting)

   • Educational institutions

   • Non-profit organizations

   • Local government agencies common thread: Large workforce handling sensitive data

5. Risk Reduction and Innovation Positioning - the final combination we mention here is most relevant to highly innovative companies, with security being a significant part of their business proposition.

   • B2B technology vendors

   • Payment processors

   • Identity management providers

   • Data analytics companies

   • Security service providers common thread: Security capability is part of value proposition

As you can see, the most effective strategies typically blend 2-3 of basic objectives, creating a nuanced approach that goes beyond a one-dimensional security perspective. The selection of relevant strategy objectives needs to be agreed on the board level / with technology and business C-executives. If the company is subject to external regulation, cyber defense has to also work closely with internal legal teams and agree a long-term compliance model.

Strategic Approach

Let's see what are possible high-level actions or program streams to turn strategic objectives into effective cyber defense to manage relevant cyber security risks.

Risk Reduction and Compliance

Focus: integrated governance

Action streams:

• Creating integrated risk/compliance frameworks

• Implementing automated monitoring

• Deploying regular assessment cycles

• Establishing clear metrics

Outcomes: reduced risk exposure, regulatory compliance, streamlined reporting, and clear risk visibility.

Resilience and Technology

Focus: advanced protection

Action Streams:

• Building layered defense systems

• Implementing advanced threat detection

• Creating automated response

• Establishing robust recovery

Outcomes: organizations achieve improved threat detection, faster incident response, enhanced recovery capability, and technical sophistication.

Maturity and Cultural Awareness

Focus: organizational evolution

Action Streams:

• Defining clear maturity milestones

• Creating comprehensive training

• Establishing security champions

• Developing cultural metrics

Outcomes: increased maturity level, security-aware culture, improved collaboration, and measurable progress.

Compliance and Cultural Awareness

Focus: people-centric security

Action Streams

• Linking compliance to workflows

• Creating simple procedures

• Establishing communication channels

• Developing user-friendly tools

Outcomes: high compliance rates, employee engagement, reduced human error, and sustainable practices.

Risk and Innovation

Focus: cyber-security as competitive advantage

Action Streams

• Developing customer-facing features

• Creating transparent reporting

• Implementing security as product feature

• Establishing security-driven development

Outcomes: market differentiation, customer trust, product enhancement, and innovation leadership.

Practical Implementation of Selected Strategies

Risk Reduction and Compliance

Core technology systems

• GRC platforms

• Monitoring tools

• Assessment frameworks

• Reporting systems

Actions: mapping requirements to controls, deploying continuous monitoring, implementing GRC platforms, and creating executive dashboards.

Success measurement: compliance scores, risk ratings, audit findings, and incident metrics.

Resilience and Technology

Core technology systems

• AI/ML security

• SIEM systems

• Response platforms

• Recovery solutions

Actions: AI monitoring, implementing zero-trust, creating response playbooks, and setting up redundancy

Success measurement: detection rates, response times, recovery metrics, and system uptime.

Maturity and Cultural Awareness

Core technology systems

• Training platforms

• Assessment tools

• Collaboration tools

• Security scorecards

Actions: launching awareness programs, deploying gamified training, forming steering committees, and creating security teams.

Success measurement: training completion, awareness scores, engagement rates, and maturity levels.

Compliance and Cultural Awareness

Core technology systems

• Policy management

• Training modules

• Communication tools

• Self-service portals

Actions: rolling out policy platforms, creating role-based training, implementing support tools, and enabling self-assessment.

Success measurement: policy adherence, training metrics, help desk tickets, and user satisfaction.

Risk and Innovation

Core technology systems

• Customer portals

• Scoring systems

• Security features

• Marketing platforms

Actions: launching customer dashboards, implementing security scoring, deploying customer controls, and creating security features.

Success measurement: market share, customer adoption, security ratings, and feature usage.

What Is Axon's Expertise

Axon Shield focus is on the following aspects of cyber defense improvements:

• Connects feeds from various cyber and networking tools

• Combines data into integrated reports and dashboards

• Provides consulting expertise to interpret and guide

• Provides APIs for selected security services

• Focus on "connecting tools to strategy"

We focus on providing data to help you collect tangible information important for your strategy objectives. Our proposition is based on providing high-value, easy to understand data quickly with a follow-up integration into your internal reporting and management processes.

• Risk reduction and compliance: aggregates data from compliance monitoring tools, create integrated risk/compliance views

• Resilience and technology: consolidates alerts and monitoring data, provides unified view of security status, enables faster incident detection and response

• Maturity and cultural: tracks security maturity metrics, creates visibility for leadership teams, supports decision-making with data

• Compliance and cultural: simplifies complex security data, makes security status understandable, enables clear communication across teams

• Risk and innovation: demonstrates security posture to stakeholders, creates transparency through dashboards