Cybersecurity has become one of the most defining economic issues today. No longer just a technical concern, it’s become central to competitiveness, resilience, and trust. Whether you sell cars or deliver packages, if you use technology, you’re part of the cyber economy—and you’re exposed to its risks. Our response must reflect that reality: strategic, collaborative, and relentlessly practical. 

Partnership is the Operating Model 

But no single organization, sector, or nation can manage cyber risk alone. Cyberthreats ignore borders and regulations. They traverse supply chains and exploit misalignments between public and private interests. That is why public–private partnership isn’t a slogan—it’s the operating model we need. Institutions built expressly to convene across divides, such as international member associations like the Information Security Forum (ISF) and the World Economic Forum (WEF), exist precisely for these cross-border challenges. Their real value isn’t just the annual conference; it’s the ongoing effort of bringing together IT providers, cybersecurity experts, policymakers, and business leaders into the same room for a common cause. 

That convening power matters most where interests diverge. For example, law enforcement’s investigatory timelines can conflict with a cloud provider’s need to protect customer privacy and maintain uptime. Bridging those tensions requires trusted frameworks for information sharing, clear ground rules for collaborative takedowns, and escalation paths that connect operational teams to senior decision makers who can unblock issues. When those bridges exist, response time shrinks, impact lessens, and lessons learned propagate faster across sectors. 

Rehearse for Reality, Not Compliance 

Resilience should be the goal, yet many leadership teams underestimate the importance of practicing it. Tabletop exercises are often treated as compliance duties or technical dry runs. That is a missed opportunity. The most effective exercises are business-led and outcome-driven. They simulate the messy reality of a cross-border incident—legal conflicts, conflicting regulator expectations, supplier outages, and the pressure of public scrutiny—and they force executive teams to practice the hard choices they will face at 2 a.m. 

Here is what good looks like. Bring the full incident economy into the room: legal, communications, finance, procurement, operations, critical third parties, and relevant public-sector partners. Make the scenario plausible and evolving, not a tidy checklist. Include decision forks that test your appetite for transparency, thresholds for regulatory notification across jurisdictions, and the mechanics of coordinated action with law enforcement. Treat data-sharing pathways as a design problem you solve before a crisis, with clear roles, permissions, and safeguards. Finally, bake the insights back into playbooks, contracts, and board reporting. Exercises only pay off when they change how you run the business. 

Harmonize Regulation Around Outcomes 

Regulation and legislation are essential, but fragmentation is a growing cost center. Businesses are navigating a complex patchwork of obligations that sometimes compete across borders. The goal shouldn’t be more rules; it should be better ones. Outcome-based regulations that incentivize timely reporting and protect responsible information sharing can reduce friction and improve security. Safe harbors for good-faith collaboration, modernized legal instruments for cross-border cooperation, and streamlined paths for collaborative disruption of cybercriminal infrastructure will do more for resilience than prescriptive checklists that age on contact with innovation. 

What does this mean for economic performance? Trust is the currency of the digital economy. Firms that invest in resilience—not just prevention—recover faster, retain customers, and secure better partnerships. Cyber maturity is increasingly priced into valuations, cost of capital, and supply-chain selection. For many organizations, the most material cyber risks are third-party risks. Proactive supplier assurance, right-sized baselines for small and medium-sized enterprises, and shared services that lift the floor for the ecosystem can reduce systemic exposure. Moving from maturity-based reporting to capability and outcome metrics—time to detect, time to contain, recovery time to critical function—aligns the board’s oversight with what actually matters when incidents occur. 

So where should CEOs and boards focus now? 

• Make cyber a business risk with business owners. Embed it into enterprise risk management, capital allocation, and strategic planning. If a cyber scenario could materially impact revenue, safety, or customer trust, it is a board-level issue—not an IT line item. 

• Join and lead cross-sector partnerships. Engage with sector-specific groups and cross-industry conveners that include public authorities. Shared intelligence, coordinated practice, and combined action are force multipliers you cannot build alone. 

• Rehearse the crisis you don’t want. Run executive-level tabletop exercises at least annually with critical suppliers and public partners. Test notification thresholds, decision rights, and the practicalities of cross-border response. 

• Measure what matters. Report to the board on the resilience metrics that predict survivability and recovery, not only on control deployment.  

Resilience is an Economic Advantage 

The cyberthreat landscape will remain dynamic, driven by fast-moving technology, well-resourced adversaries, and volatile geopolitics. But the fundamentals of good security are stable: clarity of accountability, disciplined execution, and collaboration that reaches beyond the walls of any one organization. We cannot outsource this responsibility, and we cannot solve it in isolation. 

Our collective task is to turn expertise into action and action into a durable advantage. That means convening across traditional boundaries and shaping regulatory environments that reward real resilience. If we do, we will build a digital economy that is not only innovative but dependable, and that is the competitive edge that will endure.