How to make cybersecurity a strategic asset?

Cybersecurity as a Strategic Advantage — Lessons from MIT Sloan

The Sloan School of Business Administration and Management at MIT has published a study on how companies, when faced with unprecedented disruption and uncertainty, must expand the reach of their strategy if they want to survive and prosper.

The research emphasizes that elevating cybersecurity from an operational need to a source of opportunity allows leaders to drive both resilience and competitive advantage.

From Cost to Opportunity

Despite frequent, devastating cyberattacks across industries, many organizations—including some of the largest in the world—remain unprepared. While executives often acknowledge cybersecurity as part of IT planning, they fail to see its strategic nature:

• As a serious threat to profits and operations.
• And as an opportunity to strengthen capabilities.

The study insists that resilience requires a mindset shift:

• Cybersecurity must be viewed as strategic, not operational.
• As an opportunity, not a cost.

A mature cybersecurity strategy secures critical assets, enhances learning across the organization, and reveals strengths, weaknesses, and new capabilities.

Why Cybersecurity Stays in IT’s Corner

Executives often delegate cybersecurity to IT because:

• IT has the technical expertise to respond to threats.
• Historically, IT is seen as a service provider, not a strategic driver.
• Many leaders wrongly perceive cyberattacks as random, unpredictable events.

MIT warns that cyberattacks are "predictable surprises" — exploiting structural and strategic weaknesses. No organization is immune, and even indirect attacks cause collateral damage.

Cognitive Biases at Play

Management biases mean leaders often prioritize areas in which they have prior expertise (finance, marketing, engineering). Without personal experience of a major cyber incident, they:

• Assume no attacks means effective strategy.
• Fail to adjust strategic plans for cyber risks.

Events like NotPetya showed the need to define strategic issues by their potential impact on performance.

Changing the Narrative

Executives who have guided companies through cyberattacks:

• Shift from reactive to proactive.
• View cybersecurity as a strategic investment.
• Recognize its role in strengthening leadership, communication, and processes.

Before an attack, many see cybersecurity spending as lose-lose. After an attack, they realize its value in building core strategic capabilities.

Cybersecurity as a Driver of Learning

Cyber incidents expose weaknesses beyond IT:

• Leadership development gaps.
• Communication failures.
• Process inefficiencies.

Developing a robust cybersecurity strategy can uncover opportunities while closing vulnerabilities. This strengthens integration between business and IT.

The Danger of a Narrow Focus

Companies that suffered the most long-term damage from attacks:

• Focused only on protection.
• Neglected awareness and consequence management.

Even with investments in defense and response planning, strategies failed when leaders underestimated the potential for business-wide paralysis.

The Path Forward

MIT’s recommendation:

• Interrogate all elements of organizational resilience in strategic planning.
• Ask key questions before an attack to proactively capture opportunities.
• Incorporate human cyber risk metrics, especially around employees.

At Kymatio, we contribute to this by creating visibility into employee cyber risk, enabling organizations to act early and build resilience for strategic advantage.

📚 Source: Reboot Your Strategy: Cybersecurity — MIT Sloan Management Review
By Manuel Hepfer (Saïd Business School, University of Oxford) & Thomas C. Powell (Professor of Strategy, Saïd Business School).

Related information:

• New Kymatio module prepares employees for social engineering techniques.
• Kymatio launches a module to manage the risks of employee's digital exposure.