Building Digital Resilience
Digital resilience is crucial for safeguarding businesses and economies from the growing threats of cyberattacks and disruptions. Open to read what our speakers discussed.
SAPIE, Aspen Institute Central Europe in partnership with Center for International Private Enterprise organized a discussion on the sidelines of the SAPIE Forum 2024, where our panelists discussed how transatlantic cooperation can strengthen digital resilience through joint initiatives and ethical decision-making.
Key take-aways from the discussion include
Security of a company is not a responsibility of a security team, but of everyone. But the level of responsibility differs based on the team, based on the position.
The private sector as well as citizens should assume some level of responsibilities for digital security. If the products of the private sector are not safe, the customers will not use them, therefore the private sector concerns about these topics. The customers should know where the risk lies, what are also the benefits to be able to make informed choices.
Individual responsibility of citizens and the responsibility of government needs to be aligned.
Responsibility of policymakers is to set the policies and to provide the infrastructure that is already safe. And it is also the responsibility of the government to cooperate with right partners, like Estonia does - those who share the same values, think about security while building the infrastructure, not afterwards.
Government should include all relevant stakeholders to the discussions. It is a huge problem that there is a lack of experts that are invited to the policy-design part of discussions.
The best practice is to pilot sandboxes, adapt them and set up new policies which apply for everyone. That is also what we see that Ukraine is doing.
The other challenge is that the level of digitalisation even in the EU member states differs so much.
The EU is so much regulated that it might have a problem as companies will be leaving and we see that some are already leaving. Sometimes, the problem is that 27 countries need to align on one thing, which might be challenging.
There are huge differences between approaches in Europe and in the US. The AI regulation and regulation as such is both a huge challenge, but also an opportunity.
Regarding the trust and mistrust in government decisions, the best practice is that the government should inform all citizens about what technology is using, why and how and what it brings to the whole society, and to raise awareness about technologies as such, but also inform about the risks. Different EU countries are adopting technologies, for example from China. When the government informs the citizens, it also increases trust.
We have huge opportunities with AI and AI technologies ahead of us, opportunities that can help transform our economies that are suffering, that could address some greatest societal challenges and could also help the government with whole processes.
The EU has a new mandate to leverage the digital area, digital regulations and digital policies.
Cyber attachés, who are discussing how to strengthen digital resilience between the EU and the US, are a very important part of the process of balancing safety and transatlantic cooperation.
