Radius Telecoms Inc., a subsidiary of the Manuel V. Pangilinan-led Manila Electric Company (Meralco), convened top technology executives, cybersecurity specialists and enterprise leaders at its inaugural Cyber Resilience Summit 2025 on 18 November at Seda BGC, putting a spotlight on the urgent need for secure and defensible digital infrastructures as cyber threats grow more sophisticated and unpredictable.

Co-presented with VST-ECS Philippines, the summit gathered chief information officers, chief information security officers, chief technology officers, chief executive officers, and key decision-makers across sectors including banking, technology, real estate, retail, manufacturing and logistics. The sessions aimed to equip Philippine enterprises with actionable strategies on Zero Trust security, cloud-based protection, hybrid-environment resilience, AI-driven risks and secure network convergence.

Radius Vice President and COO Alfredo Solis Jr. and Head of IT and Cyber Security Jesus Longno Jr. opened the discussions by stressing the company’s commitment to supporting organizations with secure and scalable digital infrastructure. The event featured presentations from global cybersecurity leaders iboss, Rubrik, Forcepoint, Cisco, Menlo Security and Fortinet.

The summit’s headline panel, “The Future of Cyber Resilience in the Enterprise,” was led by Meralco Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer Marilene Tayag, who challenged companies to rethink how they quantify cyber risk and determine appropriate levels of cybersecurity investment.

Tayag, responding to what she described as one of the most common questions asked of security leaders, said:

“As a leader, I’m often asked: How much security is enough? That’s a very difficult question for IT security to answer. How do you quantify or assign a value to a risk or an attack when you don’t know where it will come from? It’s invisible. You don’t know when it will happen.”

She explained that traditional assessment tools — such as cybersecurity maturity scores — help measure an organization’s capability but do not express risk in terms that business leaders understand.

“Historically, what tools do cybersecurity practitioners have? Maturity scores? These can quantify your capability and, on the flip side, your risks… but they don’t get to the core language the business understands — which is financial impact. At the end of the day, it’s about the money. And that’s what makes the question so hard to answer.”

Tayag emphasized that enterprises must calculate the financial repercussions of cyber incidents to determine their optimal security posture.

“You need to measure your exposure financially: How much would it cost you if you had to pay a regulatory penalty or manage a client impact? That’s your loss impact. You also need to look at your historical data: How many incidents have you had in the past two to three years? That’s your actual risk. From there, you get your annualized rate of occurrence.”

By identifying loss impact and likelihood, organizations can compute their annualized cost expectancy – an essential baseline in determining cybersecurity investment.

“Even if you can compute your exposure, it still doesn’t directly answer ‘How much security is enough?’ But there are established methods that estimate this — by multiplying a percentage against your annualized loss exposure or expectancy. That gives you your optimal cybersecurity investment.”

The summit concluded with closing remarks from Radius President and CEO Exequiel Delgado, who emphasized the role of cybersecurity in enabling productivity while keeping enterprise networks secure amid rapid digital transformation.

“To make sure that they become productive wherever they are and keep our networks safe in the process — it’s all about protecting businesses as they attempt to become more relevant and more progressive,” Delgado said.

“Cybersecurity is paving the way for trust, resilience, security and progress to become the norm in this rapidly changing digital world.”

Delgado underscored that cyber resilience is a shared responsibility across the digital ecosystem, calling on technology providers, solutions partners, telecommunications firms and customers to work together.

Each one of us has a role in this endeavor,” he said. “Together, let’s build a safer, smarter and more resilient future for the digital world we share.”