Executive Summary

Is cybersecurity a priority for your business? It should be. Ensuring smooth operations, optimizing performance, and securing relationships with customers and suppliers hinge on robust cybersecurity measures. CEOs who neglect this area leave their organizations exposed to greater risks. As digital vulnerabilities grow due to advancements like generative AI, quantum computing, and geopolitical instability, cybersecurity resilience is becoming crucial for business leaders. Despite recognizing its importance, many CEOs struggle with confidence in their organization’s cyber resilience and face challenges in fully integrating cybersecurity into their strategies.

A few organizations are leading the way by embracing Total Enterprise Reinvention, aiming to reinvent every aspect of their business around a digital core, fostering a culture of continuous innovation. Accenture’s research on 1,000 CEOs of large organizations reveals that while 96% see cybersecurity as vital for growth, 74% are concerned about their ability to mitigate cyber threats. This highlights a disconnect between the acknowledgment of cybersecurity’s importance and the strategic investments needed to enhance resilience.

Accenture has identified three persistent challenges for CEOs:

1. Limited understanding of cybersecurity’s business impact: Many CEOs underestimate the costs of cyberattacks and the value of cybersecurity investments, resulting in limited strategic focus.
2. Compartmentalizing cybersecurity as a compliance issue: Viewing cybersecurity merely as a compliance matter leads to episodic attention rather than ongoing focus, with many organizations failing to integrate security into their core strategies.
3. Struggling to keep pace with evolving risks: A significant portion of CEOs lack deep knowledge of the fast-changing cyber threat landscape, leaving their organizations vulnerable to emerging risks like those posed by generative AI.

To address these challenges, Accenture developed the Cyber-Resilient CEO Action Index, which benchmarks 25 leading practices for cybersecurity resilience. The top 5% of CEOs, identified as cyber-resilient, proactively embed cybersecurity into their business strategies, establish shared accountability, secure their digital core, and extend resilience beyond organizational boundaries. These leaders manage to detect, contain, and remediate cyber threats more effectively, resulting in lower breach costs and superior financial performance.

This report offers practical steps for CEOs to enhance their organization’s cyber resilience, ensuring they stay ahead of the curve in an increasingly volatile digital landscape.

The Table of Contents of “The Cyber-Resilient CEO: How confident CEOs are taking charge of cybersecurity” Report:

• Executive summary
• Cyber threat complexities
• Being risk-ready
• Five cyber-resilient actions
• The cyber-resilient CEO handbook
• Checklist for the cyber-resilient CEO
• About the research

Number of Pages:

• 44 pages

Pricing: 

• Free

Methodology

We adopted a comprehensive, multi-method approach to assess cybersecurity resilience among global CEOs. In June 2023, we surveyed 1,000 CEOs from 15 countries across 19 industries, focusing on their understanding and strategies around cybersecurity. These organizations, with annual revenues of $1 billion or more, represent a broad spectrum of sectors across North and South America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and the Middle East.

Cyber-Resilient CEO Action Index:

We developed this index by identifying 25 key cybersecurity practices across five action themes, drawing from empirical literature, expert input, and our extensive experience with high-performing organizations. This index benchmarks a company’s adoption of cybersecurity action, scoring them on a continuum from 1 to 5 points. Validation involved a statistical analysis of 1,000 CEOs, leading to the identification of three CEO archetypes:

• Cyber-Resilient CEOs: Representing 5% of the sample, these leaders score one standard deviation above the mean and have implemented at least 60% of the recommended actions.
• Cyber Followers: Comprising 49% of the sample, these CEOs also score above the mean but have adopted fewer than 60% of the actions.
• Cyber Laggards: The remaining 46% did not achieve above-average scores and lag in implementing critical cybersecurity practices.

Global Disruption Index:

To measure external business volatility and change, we developed an index comprising six sub-components covering economic, social, geopolitical, environmental, consumer, and technological spheres. This index provides a holistic view of global disruption, using a range of indicators to score each component, such as economic risk ratings, social unrest levels, and the frequency of climate-related disasters.

1. Data-Science Analysis of Investor Communications: Using prompt engineering and GPT-3.5, we analyzed earnings call transcripts from the world’s largest 2,000 companies between 2017 and 2022. This analysis focused on the frequency of cybersecurity-related keywords in CEO comments, offering insights into the growing emphasis on cybersecurity at the executive level.
2. 360° Cyber Awareness Scores: We assessed CEOs’ perceptions of cybersecurity in relation to sustainability, talent gaps, technology innovation, and customer trust. This scoring helped identify how well CEOs integrate cybersecurity into their broader strategic objectives, including environmental goals and customer retention.
3. Supplementary Research: We augmented our findings with case studies, literature reviews, and secondary research to provide a well-rounded analysis of cybersecurity practices and CEO awareness.

This rigorous methodology allowed us to develop actionable insights and benchmark tools that organizations can use to enhance their cybersecurity resilience and navigate the complex challenges of today’s digital landscape.