A group of HCM’s began discussing the creation of a HCM Security Consortium in the fourth quarter of 2021. The goal of this consortium was to help individual organizations harness the collective power of a much larger entity while also saving money on the spiraling costs of cybersecurity defense. Between staffing, audits, technology and cyber insurance, the cost of cybersecurity defense is becoming onerous while the same time, it is too dangerous to not to invest in protections.

Cybersecurity is not going to be easier nor less expensive to implement in the future. However, the faster the HCM industry can collectively achieve risk and cost control, the faster it can lower the chances of a devastating cyber event happening to one of its friends, providers, or members.

The mission of an industry utility is to provide services, in a non-biased manner, to every organization in the industry regardless of size or capability leveraging the collective so that services and costs can be improved over what any one member of the industry can accomplish independently. A unified industry effort in the fight against cyber criminals.

An essential piece of the mission is to protect our small members just as much as the large ones. Once criminals learn that the industry is financially profitable to attack, they will focus more intently on everyone in the industry. We also need to protect HCM vendors and service suppliers because any outage or attack they suffer will have downstream consequences for the individual HCM customers.

HCM Defender will provide a trusted industry-focused resource. This is a critical piece of the mission because leaders need to make wise decisions in this vital area and the providers of that advice often have an agenda. Stakeholders often have an agenda that biases their input but funding from members of its own industry places the one focus on helping the industry improve its risk profile.

We believe a collaborative approach where HCMs, partners, and service providers come together to help each other is the most cost-effective and viable solution for the future. The costs and risks for individual organizations to fight this battle on their own are too great today and will only get worse.