Data security, reputational damage and regulations enforcement are keeping corporate directors up at night, according to the results of Corporate Board Member’s 18th annual Law in the Boardroom survey conducted in February and March 2018.
Public company directors have always carried a long list of concerns on their agenda, but none has persisted for as long as the issue of cybersecurity has, and, according to our survey of 182 board members, those concerns are intensifying, as directors tell us they find cybersecurity issues difficult to assess and quantify.
“As directors, we don’t manage the company; we’re responsible for oversight and policy, but as a policy, you have to know whether an attack has taken place, how fast you need to move, the kind of data that require you to notify authorities and who you need to talk to,” says I. Bobby Majumder, partner in Perkins Coie’s Corporate practice and chair of Bluerock Residential Growth REIT.
Nearly two-thirds of directors ranked the issue of privacy and data security as their top concern this year—an increase of six percentage points since 2016, which was the last time we asked them the same question.
