What is CSR?
The concept of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) was first discussed in the 1950s though it was widely acknowledged much later during the late 1990s. The core idea of CSR is to integrate business with responsibilities towards our society and environment. CSR, in this way, is considered as the most convincing way to achieve a balance between economic, environmental and social imperatives while at the same time addressing the expectations of shareholders and stakeholders. Organizations try to enhance the reputation of a company with active CSR, although the concept of CSR goes beyond that.
How IT security is relevant to achieve CSR objectives?
With an estimated population of more than 8 billion in the world today, our earth is bearing the pressure of scarcity of natural resources. Today, extensive deforestation, too much usage of motor vehicles, emission of toxic gases from factories, vehicles, ACs etc. have made human life unbelievably miserable. Pollution of air, water and land (due to too much of waste) is bringing new health hazards too. Organizations that consider CSR as one of its core principles, invariably blossom because investors and regulators are among various stakeholders who look at these entities favorably. But in the time of increasing digitization, building digital trust should also be given utmost importance.
Worldwide digitization drive has boosted IT efficiency and brought convenience to both organization and customers. However, technological advancements in organizations has resulted in new IT complexities. The nature of IT threats are getting sophisticated. Digital records are constantly under threat from organized cyber criminals. They could target patients’ record, employees personal details or other types of personal information. Therein lies an organization’s added responsibility to protect the integrity of data which it stores and processes. Secondly, malefactors within organizations could seriously harm an organization in today’s data-centric world. Quite often, we do notice that disgruntled/ malicious insiders try to malign the reputation of an organization by stealing data.
In this backdrop, several regulations such as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has mandated stringent cyber-security policies to safeguard the privacy and integrity of personal information. Failure to implement these cyber-security/ regulatory mandates not only inflicts heavy financial damage but also damages the brand reputation — the sole reason why corporates spend so much resources on CSR. Thus in the times to come, an enterprise will not be judged solely on its CSR initiatives. The market, investors, and people in general will look at the digital footprint and cyber-security track record to judge a company.
The Bottom-line:
Harnessing digital trust should be one of the crucial steps towards attaining a robust CSR framework.
ARCON is a leading enterprise risk control solutions provider, specializing in risk-predictive technologies. ARCON | User Behaviour Analytics enables to monitor end-user activities in real-time. ARCON | Privileged Access Management reinforces access control and mitigates data breach threats. ARCON | Secure Compliance Management is a vulnerability assessment tool.
