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How has the responsibilities and challenges of a CISO changed with today's demands?
The CISO priorities have been changing with time. This adaption is vital to deal with the security challenges an enterprise faces both in a regular situation and an emergency. Fortunately, the role of a CISO has gained prominence in the past few years. Gone are those days when the responsibilities were narrowly defined along the technical lines, i.e., cybersecurity, visibility, organizational information, and data. Today the role parallels the designation of CSO and VP of security. This indicates now the position is updated beyond the confinements of the server room, and now allows the opportunity to coalesce agility, IT expertise with business proficiency. In critical situations like the current pandemic, they strive to restore normalcy and predictable functionality of a business organization.
Responsibilities and Priorities
The designation of CISO is one of the most coveted positions. It has both the technical savviness and managerial authority. While the security challenges increase every day, the responsibilities and importance of a business organization to have a CISO increase too. Further, it also important to remember that CISO is different from CSO. The former is entrusted with the job of framing security plans alongside the organization's objectives and security programs; the latter is accountable to take care of the total security requirements faced by a business.
The best way to learn about the role and responsibilities of a CISO to know what a daily job scenario looks for them. This includes:
- Providing periodic updates to the board about the security robustness of the organization.
- Real-time analysis of immediate threats, and triage when something goes wrong.
- Being well-informed of potential security threats and alerting the board about possible security problems that could arise from acquisitions or other business activities.
- Prevention of data theft and fraudulent
- Looking after the security architecture and governance
- Managing accessibility and mitigating risks
Security firm Kaspersky stated that nearly nine out of ten times CISOs are regularly summoned by the board of directors to provide recommendations for the business, in an independent study carried out with 451 Research for Q3 in 2019. This implies that business leaders are giving more importance to the security of their organization. Grant Thornton LLP and the Technology Business Management Council published a research report that states, approx. 83 percent of IT leaders have increased spending on cybersecurity in the past 12 months. Plus, thanks to CISOs, KPIs related to response and recovery times, product development, and customer satisfaction are integrated with the DevSecOps.
Challenges
Apart from that, there certain challenges faced by CISOs too. For instance, with companies moving to cloud platforms, now CISO's time will be occupied to deal with the cloud-related cybersecurity struggles. Besides, they also need to take time out to educate remote workforce on the present dangers of phishing through email and other communications. This includes teaching them what not to click on and how to proactively protect the information that is a part of their daily work. Meanwhile, as security compliance is continually becoming an integral part of every company, CISO is tasked to inspect all technology partners' agreements and review contracts to confirm if the partners will stay compliant with the organization's security policies or not.
This also means that they need to check data sources, and dashboards assigned for internal and external stakeholders. This makes it challenging to consolidate information and present meaningful dashboards to the CXOs. It further demands a huge amount of attention to the minute details in data insights so that they had the solid backing of evidence and instances to put their recommendations. Other major challenges comprise of budget constraints and communication barriers among the departments. In addition to that, they need to conduct regular auditing and reporting and ensure that the organization adheres to and is quickly updated with the latest regulatory policies. Lastly, they need to take measures enabling the switch to a proactive line of defense to counter to deal with increasing frequency of ransomware and hacking attacks.