Ebusiness offers tremendous opportunities for reducing costs and improving revenues. However, along with the advantages it also brings new threats and liabilities that leave businesses highly vulnerable to cyber attack and fraud. Business today must be concerned with the impact of . . .
Ebusiness offers tremendous opportunities for reducing costs and improving revenues. However, along with the advantages it also brings new threats and liabilities that leave businesses highly vulnerable to cyber attack and fraud. Business today must be concerned with the impact of ebusiness on core business purpose, service availability, customer confidence and privacy. All of these highly volatile elements are critical parts of a firm's reputation and valuation. And although each of these issues is separate and distinct, each is also related to a critical success factor in ebusiness today: information security. Executives can no longer afford to consider security the "locks on the doors"; instead, they must acknowledge security as an integral component of a corporate strategy - a component that is necessary to facilitate the creation of systems that respond and adapt to the rapidly changing business environments that characterize the New Economy.

The net present value (NPV) of information security is the value that is created when barriers to ebusiness are removed through mechanisms that ensure business integrity, service availability and customer/consumer confidence and privacy. Information security NPV is realized when appropriate access is facilitated so that businesses can run seamlessly without interruption. Businesses thus need to discard the outdated view of security as simply an insurance plan against fraud; they need to view it as a necessary element for the long-term viability of new markets and to ultimately enable the New Economy to achieve its full potential.

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