Businesses set to fail if cyber resilience not most important thing says Splunk strategy head

euronews (in English)

Splunk Chief Strategy Advisor for Europe, James Hodge, emphasises the importance of cyber resilience for businesses and highlights which businesses are most at risk of attacks.

Transcript

00:0010 trillion euros is the estimated cost of the cyber threat in 2025.

00:05If people don't take cyber resilience as the most important thing they can be doing,

00:09they're going to fail as a business.

00:16Welcome to The Big Question.

00:18This series from Euronews where we address

00:20some of the most important issues on the business agenda.

00:23Today I'm joined by James Hodge,

00:25the Chief Strategy Advisor for Europe at Splunk.

00:27So thank you very much for joining me today, James.

00:29Cyber security is a growing conversation

00:31and we're hearing lots of reports that the threat is getting bigger and bigger.

00:34But can you just put in perspective,

00:35how much of a problem is the cyber threat to the European economy?

00:38I think if you just look at it globally, it's a huge threat.

00:4110 trillion euros is the estimated cost of the cyber threat in 2025

00:46and by 2029 I think that's going to grow by 64%.

00:50It is, I think, one of the biggest topics of our time at the moment

00:53as we're going through this new digital boom.

00:55Can you just explain exactly what a cyber attack looks like?

00:57Everything is digital nowadays.

00:59So I think what a cyber attack really is,

01:01is someone has found a way into my infrastructure

01:04and either steal information from it

01:07or they might block access to that or delete it.

01:11So the impact of that can be really large.

01:13If you think from a hospital point of view

01:15or anything critical infrastructure,

01:17the impact of maybe something very simple

01:19like a patient booking system being unavailable

01:22or the system in hospital to go and get blood tests

01:25being able to be locked out can have a catastrophic consequence.

01:28So when you think about what those types of cyber crimes are,

01:31typically they are either something called a distributed denial of service attack.

01:35I think last year that counted 46% of all attacks on businesses

01:39where they just flood the business with lots of requests.

01:43Imagine lots of people are just shouting at you

01:45and you now don't know what to do.

01:47Or ransomware, where an operating system comes up

01:50and asks you to update your software.

01:52If you don't do that, you may be vulnerable to one of these types of attacks.

01:56Someone gets into your computer and locks you out

01:59and then extorts you for money to go and get access to it back.

02:02And we're definitely seeing that on the rise.

02:04After a company has been attacked, what does that actually mean for a business?

02:07I think the first thing that happens when a company gets attacked

02:10is you get this period of uncertainty.

02:13You're trying to get into the essence of what happened.

02:16Really what we have is failure.

02:18And failure starts to bring in doubt.

02:20The next time you want to do some innovation,

02:22you want to roll out a new piece of software,

02:23you've always got it at the back of your mind.

02:25Have we got this right? Have we protected it a bit more?

02:27And you start to stutter. You start to lose that pace of innovation.

02:30And now the speed of innovation in the marketplace

02:33is potentially the most important thing

02:36because it's so competitive.

02:38But you can't do this at the cost of failure and cyber breaches

02:41because trust is paramount to running a business.

02:45It takes about 75 days to recover from those cyber incidents.

02:48In terms of cost, we did some work last year

02:51on a report called Cost of Downtime

02:53that looked at the global top 2,000 businesses.

02:55And on average, each business could attribute

02:59around €195 million of cost to downtime,

03:02€44 million of which was lost profit.

03:11Is there a big difference between the protection that different businesses have?

03:15Take the European Union.

03:17Businesses that are less than $250 million of revenue

03:21are twice as likely to have a cyber breach

03:24than a business that's over $5 billion of revenue.

03:27Why?

03:28Because businesses over $5 billion of revenue

03:30are really heavily investing in cyber protection,

03:33cyber best practices,

03:35whereas businesses under $250 million

03:37might be much smaller,

03:39they might be on that meteoric rise

03:41as they're going through that innovation pace,

03:43so they haven't thought about it.

03:45So is there a greater knock-on effect

03:47of those businesses being at risk?

03:49Big corporations quite often look to the SME community

03:52to go and take that unique innovation

03:54and then start to embed that into what they do.

03:56There's two knock-ons.

03:58One is we might end up having those big services

04:00provided by big corporations.

04:02The other side is we are potentially squashing innovation

04:05and slowing down innovation that is incredible.

04:08And so it's getting that right,

04:10promoting cyber best practices,

04:12it's not a bad thing,

04:13and really unlocking that innovation

04:15and potential that we can go and have.

04:17As technologies progress,

04:19is that making the cyber risk worse

04:21or is it aiding the fight, do you think?

04:23I think it is adding a huge amount of complexity.

04:25As we get more advances in technology,

04:27the opportunity to be creative,

04:29bring something new into the world,

04:31get first to market,

04:33really is exciting.

04:35If you think about technology today

04:36compared to 20 years ago,

04:38it's liberating.

04:39It's one word you could use for it.

04:41But it's also increasing your attack factors,

04:43your surface of what could be attacked,

04:45is going up so much more.

04:47What can be done to help reduce the risk for businesses

04:51and maybe reduce any gaps in the armour?

04:53When a business thinks about risk,

04:56the first thing they shouldn't be doing

04:57is thinking about technology.

04:58The favourite thing I like is pre-mortem.

05:01Thinking about,

05:02okay, we're going to launch something,

05:04this is going to fail.

05:06How could it fail?

05:08Before, what we used to have

05:10would be a single department

05:11we'd go and think about.

05:12It might have been IT.

05:13Then cyber might have thought about that

05:14later on just before release.

05:16Whereas now it's much more of a cross-functional issue.

05:19We have legal, we have compliance,

05:21HR starting to get involved,

05:23sales, marketing, IT, cyber.

05:26So when a business starts to think about cybersecurity,

05:29they first should be thinking cross-functionally

05:31on what could go wrong,

05:32what is the impact of this,

05:34and let's plan for that failure

05:36and then go and get prepared for that.

05:38Because that creates the right culture

05:40that you can then go and accelerate the technology.

05:42Rather than thinking,

05:43technology is this magic silver bullet

05:44and that's going to protect us from everything.

05:46Looking to the future,

05:47how do you see the cyber threat developing?

05:50One of the things that ANISA,

05:51the European Cybersecurity Agency,

05:53came out with in their 2024 report

05:55was that 26% of attacks were ransomware attacks

06:00and they're seeing that rise.

06:01The World Economic Forum,

06:02in their 2025 cybersecurity assessment,

06:05said that 74% of the respondents

06:07said that cybersecurity attacks were on the rise.

06:11So it's getting more complicated,

06:13but we are seeing more international cooperation.

06:15There's a big operation

06:16to go and take down ransomware as a service providers.

06:20So Lockbit, very famous,

06:22got taken down with a joint operation

06:24between the United States, the UK, Interpol,

06:28Europol, and other organisations around the world.

06:32So I'm starting to see governments

06:33also see this as a competitive advantage

06:35to go and work together

06:37to be able to go and secure people

06:39as much as possible

06:40and go and set up as much best practices

06:42to go and combat that race between cyber criminals

06:46and the rest of the world.

06:48And finally, if companies don't address this issue,

06:51will the potential problem grow?

06:52What could be the impact

06:53for the European economy going forward?

06:55If people don't take cyber resilience,

06:57digital resilience,

06:58as the most important thing they can be doing,

07:01they're going to fail as a business

07:02and if you think about 10 years ago,

07:04near the pace of innovation

07:06to the pace of innovation today,

07:08it's just breathtaking

07:09and those advances are only going to go and increase.

07:12At school, I was rubbish at art.

07:14I think my school art report said,

07:15James enjoys art.

07:17Yeah, a good conversation with a chat GPT

07:19and I can create amazing ideas.

07:21So what it can do is incredible.

07:23Now apply that to the technology space,

07:25to what you can do with 3D printing.

07:26That is breathtaking.

07:28What we actually need is creative minds

07:30that can now work with technology.

07:31If we don't then think about the resilience of that,

07:34we're always going to be on the back foot

07:36because we're always thinking about protection agenda

07:39rather than a growth and an innovation agenda

07:42because we've not thought about security

07:43by first principles.

07:44Thank you so much for your insights today.

07:45It's been fascinating

07:46and thank you for joining me on The Big Question.

07:48Thank you very much.

Category

Transcript

Recommended