C-Suite’s Guide to Cybersecurity Best Practices for Digital Transformation and AI Evolution

Increasing reliance on digital systems today amplifies the business impacts of cyberattacks. As a C-suite leader, it’s crucial to understand that cybersecurity best practices are not just the responsibility of IT departments. Whether your organization is undergoing digital transformation, incorporating third-party artificial intelligence (AI) tools into your business processes or developing AI applications, embracing the cybersecurity approaches highlighted in this post can help you protect your organization.

Cybersecurity Risks in Digital Transformation

Cyberattacks are common and continuing to rise. Over half (52%) of cybersecurity professionals have experienced an increase in cyberattacks since October 2023¹ and most directors (65%) still believe their organizations are at risk of a material cyberattack within the next 12 months.² This should be a high priority since data breaches cost companies an average of $4.45 million.³

The anatomy of a cyberattack typically follows a consistent pattern: Cybercriminals find your company’s digital systems and exploit vulnerabilities, identifying valuable information to either access themselves or withhold access from you and your customers.

As businesses increasingly rely on digital transformations and third-party AI tools, the stakes for cybersecurity have never been higher. Your customer experiences, inventory management, logistics and employee operations are more reliant on your digital ecosystem, making them vulnerable to cyberattacks.

And while developing your own AI models can improve your existing services or create new revenue streams, hackers have been directly targeting and manipulating susceptible models.

To effectively combat these ever-evolving threats, you’ll need a holistic approach that involves both preventive measures and recovery processes.

Building a Preventive Cybersecurity Fortress for Your Digital Ecosystem

Half of the cybersecurity battle is preventing cybercriminals from finding and exploiting vulnerabilities in your systems. Digital ecosystems utilize multiple types of solutions — such as cloud vs. on-prem — and security teams need to utilize layers of security to protect every facet of the ecosystem.

Imagine you’re trying to protect a castle. It would be helpful to build the castle among mountains with only a few well-guarded passes and to remove its location from common maps. By utilizing a private network infrastructure, unauthorized individuals will have trouble finding directions into your network. Built-in, AI-enabled network threat intelligence provides your security guards with intel on crimes that have been attempted virtually anywhere in the world, helping them proactively stop similar attempts.

Now we’re outside your castle. Having a moat and bridge creates a forced point of entry so your security team can inspect and intercept incoming traffic. Network firewalls stand at the gates of your network to filter out malware and bad actors and web application firewalls do the same for your web applications.

But even with top-notch security guards and a thriving castle, attackers can disrupt business by flooding your bridge with hordes of dangerous traffic, blocking merchants and citizens from getting through and causing guards to get overwhelmed. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks overwhelm your network with excessive traffic, blocking legitimate access so the criminals can demand ransom or sneak past the guards. DDoS prevention services expand your bridge, helping ensure that traffic remains manageable for your guards, merchants and citizens.

Inside the castle, you can divide your valuables into multiple buildings and provide access to individuals on a building-by-building basis, making it difficult and time-consuming for criminals to penetrate multiple buildings. And if attackers successfully disguise themselves as castle employees, their access would be isolated to a single building. Containerizing your data and code by function helps your team monitor and respond to suspicious activity and limits the damage of breaches.

You could also station guards throughout each building who only grant access for approved individuals and take inventory of each room’s contents. This is like zero trust security and data encryption, which help block unauthorized access and track modifications to your data and applications. For instance, Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASBs) utilize these security approaches to monitor access and behavior across cloud applications.

Combining these measures can help provide the foundation for a safe castle. However, a high percentage of cyberattacks results from unauthorized individuals tricking honest citizens into inviting them past the guards, so it’s important to teach your citizens how to identify threats and to station guards outside each home (this is where our castle gets a little authoritarian). By consistently training employees and monitoring their devices with endpoint security, you’ll reduce the risk of attacks that target human vulnerabilities.

It’s a challenge to provide effective, manageable cybersecurity when your workforce is geographically distributed or your network incorporates combinations of public and private clouds, on-prem infrastructure and data centers. Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) bundles multiple cybersecurity solutions into one platform for simplified monitoring and management.

How AI usage impacts your cybersecurity plan

When your company utilizes third-party AI tools like Microsoft Copilot or Salesforce Agentforce, you’re feeding your own data into their systems. Each vendor you add to your digital ecosystem expands the potential points-of-attack for your business.

In addition to the previously mentioned cybersecurity measures, it’s best practice to only feed your AI tools with data that has been encrypted and anonymized to help reduce the damage that stolen data can cause. You should also limit the security clearance that you provide to third-party tools and prioritize updates to vendors who need significant clearance. If not managed properly, their vulnerabilities can quickly become your vulnerabilities.

Preventive cybersecurity for AI providers

For companies that create AI solutions for others, two major points of attack involve disrupting the transport of data and directly tinkering with the AI model’s code.

Developing AI requires your network to constantly transport massive amounts of data between your data centers and cloud environments. To continue with the castle metaphor, you’ll need wider roads to allow for a greater number of merchants by implementing robust networking products like dark fiber or wavelengths.

If hackers gain access to your model, they can tinker with the code to compromise the functionality and reliability of your AI model’s outputs with attacks like SQL injections. Collaboration between your development and security teams should establish best practices like containerizing code, consistently testing for vulnerabilities in the code, monitoring anomalies in performance and validating team members before and after they make changes.

Establish Processes for Recovery and Redundancy

It’s important to recognize that prevention is only half the cybersecurity battle. You also need a skilled, well-staffed team to monitor and react to threats 24/7, with established testing schedules, incident response plans, disaster recovery plans and technological redundancy across your entire digital ecosystem. If that sounds daunting, managed services offerings and virtual security and control centers (VSOCs) help provide businesses with additional IT experts that can consult, build and monitor traffic to mitigate network and security issues.

It’s Time to Fortify Your Cybersecurity Posture

With digital technologies becoming increasingly vital to the future of business, your organization must apply cybersecurity measures to help protect your investments. Implementing a secure network provides a natural foundation for building a holistic approach to cybersecurity.

We help protect customers’ networks by leveraging our unmatched network visibility to train our proactive AI threat defense model and arm our Black Lotus Labs cybersecurity team with data to monitor your network 24/7. By pairing our secure network with the right cybersecurity solutions, you can confidently protect your digital ecosystem and maintain business continuity.

Take the next step in securing your digital future with flexible, scalable network and security solutions.

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¹Infosecurity Magazine, Half of Cybersecurity Professionals Report Increase in Cyberattacks, October 3, 2023.
²Harvard Business Review, Boards Are Having the Wrong Conversations About Cybersecurity, May 2, 2023.
³IBM, Cost of a Data Breach, 2024.

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