When the CrowdStrike update failure in 2024 disrupted operations at airlines, banks, hospitals, and contact centers worldwide, it wasn’t the CISO who had to explain the fallout to clients. It was the COO. The estimated impact crossed $5 billion in losses, and Delta alone claimed more than $500 million from disrupted flights, stranded passengers, and operational collapse that stretched across five days (Harvard Business Review, 2025).
That event made something explicit that operations leaders have been slowly absorbing for years: cybersecurity is no longer a technology function problem. It’s a business operations problem, and the COO is now firmly in the accountability chain.
The data confirms the shift. The average cost of a data breach in the United States reached $10.22 million in 2025, an all-time high for any region globally, according to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report. Meanwhile, CompTIA’s 2025 State of Cybersecurity report found that 49% of organizations still view cybersecurity as the technology function’s exclusive responsibility, a framing that leaves COOs dangerously underprepared for the exposure they already carry.
The most immediate consequence of a successful cyberattack isn’t data loss. It’s an operational downtime. Ransomware encrypts systems. Malware disrupts workflows. Incident response forces organizations to pause critical processes while forensics teams assess scope.
In 2025, a malware attack against a major enterprise caused an estimated $136 million in daily operational impact while it persisted, and the breach originated from a misconfigured VPN, not a sophisticated exploit (Computer Solutions, 2026). For COOs managing customer-facing delivery, collections of workflows, or back-office processing, this kind of downtime has direct consequences on SLAs, client commitments, and revenue recognition.
Cybersecurity is therefore not about preventing a breach in the abstract. It’s about preventing the operational disruption that follows.
The single largest driver of cybersecurity incidents is not technology failure, it’s people. Stanford University research finds that 88% of all cybersecurity breaches involve human error. Verizon’s 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report confirms that 68% of breaches involve a human element.
For the COO, this is not a CISO’s problem to solve alone. The agents handling customer calls, the back-office staff processing sensitive data, the collections teams working regulated accounts, they are the operational surface where most exposure lives. Training frequency, process design, access control policy, and workflow structure are all COO-adjacent decisions that directly determine how much human-error risk the organization carries.
McKinsey has reported a 1,200% increase in phishing attacks since the rise of generative AI in late 2022, a trend that doesn’t distinguish between technical users and operational staff. If operations teams are the primary attack surface, operations leaders need to be co-owners of the response.
For context on how AI is creating new exposure vectors across business functions, Epicenter’s analysis of how AI is transforming business operations outlines the productivity gains, and the governance responsibilities, that come with AI integration at scale.
Verizon’s 2025 DBIR reported that third-party involvement in breaches doubled year-over-year to 30%, driven by vulnerability exploitation and business interruptions across supply chains and partner ecosystems. That figure has profound implications for every COO managing outsourced operations, vendor relationships, or multi-partner delivery models.
When a vendor system is compromised, the operational and reputational consequences land on the client organization. The COO, who owns those vendor relationships and performance agreements, is the executive accountable for whether those third parties meet security and compliance standards not just SLA metrics.
Organizations operating in regulated industries, financial services, healthcare, insurance carry particular exposure under frameworks like HIPAA, FDCPA, and CCPA, where vendor data handling is subject to direct regulatory scrutiny. Managing third-party cybersecurity risk has become core to operational oversight as managing vendor quality or cost performance.
The Hiscox Cyber Readiness Report 2024 found that 43% of businesses lost existing customers as a direct consequence of a cyberattack. That customer attrition doesn’t wait for the breach notification letter. It begins the moment service is disrupted, systems go dark, and the operational experience degrades.
For organizations in customer care, collections, and back-office services, the customer relationship is the product. A cybersecurity event that disrupts contact center availability, compromises interaction data, or triggers an unplanned system outage doesn’t just create legal exposure; it directly damages the client relationships the COO is responsible for preserving.
Cybersecurity is, in this frame, a customer experience risk. And customer experience is squarely the COO’s domain.
In 2024, T-Mobile entered a $31.5 million settlement with the FCC following a series of data breaches that exposed customer data across multiple incidents (Keepnet Labs, 2025). GDPR fines have reached a cumulative €5.65 billion as of early 2025. The SEC now requires public companies to disclose material cybersecurity incidents within four business days of determining materiality.
These aren’t penalties that land on the IT department. They land on the organization, and the accountability trail leads through the operations structure as much as the security function. COOs who treat cybersecurity compliance as someone else’s documentation problem are carrying undisclosed regulatory exposure.
The operational response to a breach, incident logging, client notification timelines, service continuity documentation, is a COO function. Getting it wrong, as Intercontinental Exchange found when it was fined $10 million for violating data breach reporting rules in 2024, creates legal cost on top of operational cost (Embroker, 2025).
Generative AI adoption has widened the operational attack surface at a pace that security teams are still calibrating to. According to the World Economic Forum’s Global Cybersecurity Outlook Report 2025, 66% of organizations expect AI to meaningfully impact cybersecurity in the next 12 months. Gartner projects that 17% of all cyberattacks will employ generative AI by 2027.
The risk isn’t hypothetical. AI tools embedded in operational workflows, agent assist platforms, knowledge management systems, analytics dashboards, create new data access points, integration surfaces, and model behavior risks that COOs are deploying faster than governance frameworks are being built.
The way AI is integrated into operations is an operational decision. Ensuring that integration is secure is therefore an operational accountability, not one that can be fully delegated to a security team that didn’t choose the technology.
Epicenter’s discussion of business process automation — ROI, implementation, and risk addresses exactly this tension: the productivity case for automation is compelling, but the implementation decisions that follow have security and governance implications that live in the operations layer.
More than 77% of organizations do not have a formal incident response plan, according to Cybint research. For those that do, cybersecurity scenarios are frequently treated as edge cases rather than primary continuity threats — despite being the most common cause of major operational disruption in 2024 and 2025.
Business continuity is the COO’s function. But a continuity plan that doesn’t account for ransomware, supply chain compromise, or a prolonged system outage driven by a security incident is not a real continuity plan. It’s a plan with a blind spot.
US data breaches hit a record 3,322 reported incidents in 2025, a 4% increase over the prior year, according to the Identity Theft Resource Center (Barracuda Networks, 2026). That number will not decline on its own. Building cyber resilience into operational continuity planning, recovery time objectives, failover protocols, vendor breach response procedures, is now foundational to operating at enterprise scale.
Ownership doesn’t mean becoming a security expert. It means ensuring that cybersecurity considerations are embedded in the decisions a COO already makes.
Do third-party partners meet your security standards? Are those standards in the contract?
Is cybersecurity awareness training treated as an operational process, regular, tracked, accountable or a one-time onboarding event?
Does your operations team know its role in a breach of response, including client notification timelines and service continuity protocols?
Are new tools assessed for security posture before deployment into operational workflows?
Does your business continuity plan include specific scenarios for ransomware, system outage, and third-party breach, with defined recovery timelines?
These aren’t security questions. They’re operations questions. And they need operations leadership to own them.
Organizations that build cybersecurity accountability into their operational structure — not just their IT function, recover faster, face lower breach costs, and maintain client trust through incidents that would otherwise cause lasting damage.
The distinction between “the CISO’s problem” and “the COO’s problem” is structural fiction that cyberattacks don’t recognize. The breach hits the system. The operational disruption hits the business. And the accountability for both lands on the leadership team together.
If you’re evaluating how operational design and technology governance connect in a delivery environment, explore how Epicenter approaches back-office operations and customer service and tech support with security-conscious, compliance-ready delivery built into the operating model.
Cybersecurity is a COO’s responsibility because the consequences of a breach are primarily operational — workflow disruption, SLA failures, customer attrition, regulatory penalties, and vendor liability. While the CISO owns technical security posture, the COO owns the business processes, vendor relationships, workforce behavior, and continuity planning that either amplify or contain the damage when a breach occurs. These are operations decisions, not IT decisions.
The average cost of a data breach in the United States reached $10.22 million in 2025 — an all-time high for any region globally, according to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report. This figure includes direct financial losses, legal and regulatory costs, incident response expenses, and the long-tail business impact from customer attrition and reputational damage.
Human error is the leading cause of cybersecurity breaches. Stanford University research finds that 88% of all cybersecurity incidents involve human error, and Verizon’s 2025 DBIR confirms that 68% of breaches involve a human element. This makes workforce behavior, training frequency, and access control design — all COO-adjacent decisions — among the most important cybersecurity levers an organization can control.
Third-party vendor involvement in breaches doubled to 30% in the 2025 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report. When a vendor’s systems are compromised, the operational and regulatory consequences often fall on the client organization. For COOs managing outsourced functions — customer care, back-office, collections, or technology services — vendor security standards need to be treated as operational requirements, not just procurement considerations.
A COO’s cybersecurity incident response responsibilities should cover client notification timelines and communication protocols, service continuity procedures during system outages, vendor breach response procedures and contractual obligations, regulatory reporting requirements (particularly in industries subject to HIPAA, FDCPA, CCPA, or SEC disclosure rules), and defined operational recovery time objectives for critical workflows. These are operational functions that cannot be fully delegated to a security team.