Embarking on a digital transformation journey is rarely without cyber risk
Embarking on a digital transformation journey is rarely without cyber risk
Publish Date: 2026-05-17 23:51:00
Source Domain: www.thetimes.com
Cyber threats are always a concern for organisations that depend on technology for their services or processes. Adding a business or digital transformation into the mix can increase the risks, particularly when cybersecurity is not prioritised, integrated and managed from the very beginning.
The biggest risk, says Len McAuliffe, partner, cybersecurity, privacy and forensics at PwC Ireland, is that transformation increases complexity faster than organisations increase control.
“Businesses are moving data, processes and customer services across cloud, digital and connected environments at speed,” he says.
“That creates more dependencies, more access points and more opportunities for things to go wrong.
“A lot of the exposure sits around identity, third parties, legacy technology and weak visibility across the estate,” he adds.
“If an organisation cannot see clearly what it has, who has access to it and where its critical dependencies sit, it becomes much harder to defend. That is why cyber risk rises so quickly during transformation. The technology changes, the operating model changes and the attack surface changes with it.”
Contributing to the problem, says Brian Honan, founder of BH Consulting, is the fact that businesses often don’t see cyber risk as being a business risk, particularly when a digital transformation is involved.
“They see it as being an IT/digital risk without realising that a cyberattack or reliance on digital technology is a major business risk in the event that anything goes wrong.”
And things can go spectacularly wrong. Recent high-profile examples include a cyberattack on Marks & Spencer in 2025 that disrupted supply chains and resulted in the retailer’s online shopping being suspended for seven weeks, with its click and collect service down for even longer. The estimated cost to the business was £300m in lost sales.
Elsewhere, an attack on Jaguar Land Rover at the end of August 2025 led to production being shut…
