Cybersecurity is the survival of businesses and CISOs must act now
Cybersecurity is an endless challenge for companies. As they catch up, the bad guys innovate their techniques to continually stay one step ahead. It’s a problem that’s here to stay, meaning cyber risk has become a business risk.
Organizations know everything that threatens their IT, threatens their business. It is a pattern that we still see: breaches are committed against companies and reputational and/or financial damage occurs. As such, cybersecurity is now a governance issue and an ongoing topic of conversation within corporate leadership teams. Yet organizations must take greater steps to make their cybersecurity position as strong as possible – their business depends on it.
Assessing cyber risks
Companies understand the consequences that a cyber attack can have on the entire company. Research shows that almost a third (31%) experienced six or more attacks between June 2023 and 4, compared to the same period the year before.
The impact of an attack is enormous and the consequences affect the entire company. One of the most crucial tasks of a CISO is therefore to rank cyber risks in order of impact. This requires an equal understanding of the company and its technology stack and is not an easy task.
Part of this assessment requires understanding the priorities within the organization’s value chain and securing them accordingly. The second part of the challenge is to look beyond the business itself and understand what outside forces may be impacting it. Among these external forces we find the compliance framework – laws and regulations necessary to protect people, intellectual property and innovation.
However, duality regulation presents a challenge. While necessary for protection, they hinder and stifle IT teams that need to integrate legal considerations into their defense. The more known about cyber risks and regulations, the better. Knowledge is the feather in an IT team’s cap, and IT teams and boards must work together to leverage learnings from other parts of the business and other regulations within their security practices.
Limiting technical risks
Defense strategies are a must when it comes to cybersecurity resilience. Assessing the right combination of products, services, personnel and processes is crucial. Less is more in this matter. This is especially the case because, after years of technology accumulation, CISOs realize the hard way that a mass of products and suppliers is not efficient. The next era of security will happen through convergence, not addition.
Put your board aside
CISOs have a tough job, but at the heart of their success, in addition to the steps we’ve already discussed, is ensuring that their board truly understands cyber risks and gives them the support needed to combat them. This can be done not only through education, but also by offering options. When faced with a cybersecurity challenge, CISOs must provide information and a set of solutions over which their board has the final say. It is part of the job of CISOs to present scenarios as a series of documented steps, with an initial suggestion, followed by a second and third suggestion. This ensures that the CISO becomes a powerful execution leveler and gets a consensus-based decision on how to proceed, rather than being singled out and blamed when something goes wrong.
In addition, it is critical that CISOs and CEOs are aligned with the CISO reporting directly to the CEO. The consequences of not doing so are unclear or diluted support. With the company’s survival at stake during a cyberattack, cybersecurity must be built into an organization’s strategy and CISOs must have direct access to the top decision maker.
Final thoughts
Cybersecurity is not about avoidance, but is instead an approach that embraces the fact that it is only a matter of time before a business is attacked. Prioritizing cyber risk management and recovery is critical and organizations must do this through better connected and secured systems.
Whether your solutions are legacy, old-school, best-of-breed, or brand new, the number of technologies, vendors, processes, and digital transformations require simplification in the race for security.
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