Why Cybersecurity is now a core investment risk for serious investors

By Jayant Manglik, Partner, Fortuna Asset Managers LLP

For decades, investors evaluated risk through familiar lenses like market cycles, competitive intensity, leverage, governance, and regulatory change. From the vantage point of someone who has spent years leading large teams which were onboarding clients, managing expectations through market cycles, and overseeing portfolios across their full investment journey, cybersecurity, until recently, sat outside this framework, treated as a technical or operational issue delegated to IT teams and rarely debated in investment committees. That separation is no longer tenable. Today, cybersecurity has emerged as a core investment risk, one that can permanently impair enterprise value, disrupt cash flows, and erode investor trust within hours.

The shift is driven by three structural realities

First, cyber risk has become systemic rather than episodic. Enterprises are now deeply digital: customer acquisition, payments, supply chains, data storage, and even core IP sit on interconnected ...