Decision-making criteria for cybersecurity adoption

Abstract

The goal of the study is to address the problem of decision-makers’ lack of guidance in issues related to cybersecurity investment. In order to achieve the goal, we identify and prioritize factors that influence such decision, and introduce a high-level sequence of decision-making actions aiming to guide an executive in order to understand risks and make an informed cybersecurity investment decision. The study serves as a basis for the future comprehensive framework development, and would be particularly useful to the Internet of Things (IoT) industry executives, since due to its specific nature IoT is very much exposed to cyber-threats, and due to the fact that IoT operations adoption is rapidly growing in areas in which security was not a consideration before. The thesis serves as a basis for an academic paper, which was successfully presented at the 10th Security Research Conference “Future Security 2015” hosted by the Fraunhofer Institute in Berlin, Germany, and published in the conference proceedings.