Strategic approaches to ensuring information security in the context of digitalisation of economic processes

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to identify the relationship between digital security and economic sustainability in the context of digital governance transformation on the example of Albania, Lithuania, Estonia, Croatia, and the Czech Republic. The methodological framework included structural-functional analysis, processing of statistical indicators, and econometric modelling of the dependencies between the level of digital security and indicators of economic activity. Special attention was paid to the analysis of modern cybersecurity regulations adopted in 2024-2025, with a focus on sectoral regulation and the powers of national authorities. The study found that countries with greater values of the digital maturity index (up to 74.3 in Estonia) and human capital (up to 0.79), as well as with a prominent level of employee coverage by corporate cyber awareness programmes (up to 81% in the same country), demonstrated lower productivity losses due to cyber incidents, greater resilience to solvency risks (up to 0.33 in the Czech Republic), and a greater share of e-commerce in the gross domestic product (GDP) (up to 9.8% in the Czech Republic). The active implementation of digital security tools was found to be accompanied by a decrease in the negative impact of incidents on the activities of enterprises, although in some cases (e.g., in Estonia) high losses were maintained with a small number of violations. The study determined that the introduction of cloud services and multi-level authentication is critical to increasing the adaptability of economic systems to digital challenges and reducing the overall level of vulnerability of enterprises. The summary results of the study highlighted the need to integrate technical solutions, digital education, institutional protocols, and corporate cyber hygiene culture into a single, coherent digital security strategy that factors in the specifics of national digitalisation models. The findings of this study can be used by public authorities, small and medium-sized businesses, analytical institutions, and developers of digital strategies to optimise information security management mechanisms.