According to Deloitte's "Cyber's Growing Role Within the Finance Organization to Enable Transformation" poll, 48.8% expect the number and size of cyber events targeting their organizations’ accounting and financial data to increase in the year ahead. Interestingly, just 20.3% say their organizations’ accounting and finance teams work closely and consistently with their peers in cybersecurity.
During the past 12 months, 34.5% of the executives polled for the report said their organizations’ accounting and financial data was targeted by cyber adversaries. Within that group, 22% experienced at least one such cyber event and 12.5% experienced more than one.
Temano Shurland, a Deloitte Risk & Financial Advisory principal in finance transformation for Deloitte & Touche LLP, says that accounting and financial data is the lifeblood of organizational operations. "Often it's meant to be kept confidential outside of highly regulated public disclosures for publicly traded organizations. While there may not have been much need for accounting, finance and cyber teams to work closely in the past, recent years have shown that’s no longer the case. We strongly recommend that these teams try to ‘learn each other’s languages’ and tighten their working relationships across silos.”
Looking ahead, 39.5% expect to increase the amount of collaboration between their finance and cyber teams. Currently, 42.7% of polled leaders say their organizations’ finance and cyber teams only work together as needed with inconsistent closeness and consistency, while 11.1% do not work together at all.
“As cyber incidents increase in frequency, size and complexity, adversaries target nearly any data obtainable and by leveraging system vulnerabilities,” says Daniel Soo, a Deloitte Risk & Financial Advisory principal in cyber and strategic risk, Deloitte & Touche LLP. “Implementing financial security operations—something you could call FinSecOps—means protecting financial data. Asking finance, accounting and security functions to team closely to manage FinSecOps is one preventative step we’re seeing leading organizations take, so that they are agile enough to mitigate threats to financial data and help enable business growth."
To view the poll, CLICK HERE.
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