When corporations reach a certain size, every risk starts to get a figure associated with, which accounts for how much money that risk is expected to cost the business over a year or period of time. Once you get to this point, businesses start to get an increased incentive to reduce these costs at every turn, and security is one of the biggest potential risks, and eliminating that risk would be ideal for businesses. Is this ever possible?

In short, no, but here’s why. As part of any interaction with anything else, as a rule you leave yourself exposed. This isn’t just a truth of business but of all human interaction, but it becomes more serious when you begin to understand just how interconnected the world is. The world, mostly because of the internet, but globalisation has played its part too, is more interconnected now than ever before, and this trend towards interconnectedness and interdependency looks set to continue to steamroll ahead.

In business, this interconnectedness presents itself in a number of different ways. It could mean providing remote access to company data so that employees from around the world can access what they need to do their job, or it could mean making it easy for customers to interact with your website. There is a point at which the needs for security becomes too onerous for a business model to sustain, which is the point at which a risk has to be accepted.

Online banking is a great example of this. Everybody knows, particularly in the industry, that internet banking will never be entirely secure. Even so, members of the public continue to gravitate towards services which are quick and convenient to access, which in effect encourages lackadaisical security.

At the end of the day, corporations are reactive entities. They react to a given situation and environment, and receive and provide services demanded by the situation and environment. In terms of the security provided by corporations for their customers and their own money and data, they are limited by what the potential of the situation and environment can provide.