Secrets from future facing CISOs for long-term success

colleagues walking in office

Global, May 11, 2022

To compete in a modern marketplace, businesses need to be able to adapt to opportunities in real-time. Requiring unprecedented digital agility and flexibility, businesses need to maintain security and data integrity.

A recent survey from Gartner found that 57% of respondents said that COVID-19 resulted in the CIO, CEO and other senior stakeholders becoming better educated on the value of security and risk management. To maintain this momentum and drive businesses, forwards how can security leaders balance risk and innovation for long-term success? Together, Logicalis and Microsoft held a series of roundtables exclusively for future facing CISOs to come together and discuss their thoughts on just how this can be achieved for long-term success. During the roundtables they shared their top secrets for long-term success:

1. Prove to justify action

Effective cybersecurity has become a core pillar of business growth and as such conventional approaches are often no longer adequate. In fact according to data from EY Global Information Security Survey (GISS) 2020, 34% of organisations that suffered a significant attack took over a month to detect the breach.

Organisations are becoming more aware of the impacts that security risks can have on business operations, though there is still a lot of work to be done. As the role of the CISO continues to evolve and becomes ever more C-suite adjacent, they need to connect security objectives to business requirements. To prove the risk posed to organisations and justify action, CISOs need to align security objectives, both quantitatively through risks and vulnerabilities to establish a baseline, and qualitatively through strategic risk program management. This two-pronged approach helps to prove risk in the context of impact to easily justify action, effort, and cost.

2. Use security to accelerate innovation rather than arrest it

As digital transformation continues apace alongside technological innovation, so does cyber risk and threat. While the definition of cybersecurity in the modern world is rapidly becoming more diverse, and often more responsive, it's critical that security does not arrest the progress of innovation in its efforts to protect business operations against emerging threats.

CISOs need to look to cybersecurity approaches that instil agility at their core for success in this area. When executed correctly, it is the ability to be agile that offers the best way to manage risk without inhibiting innovation and growth. Security approaches that leverage the cloud offer a brilliant way to implement controls in a structure manner that provide flexibility for innovation and growth while remaining secure.

3. Create a single ‘pane of glass’ view

Many CISOs are challenged with managing multiple disparate teams and systems, who don’t necessarily interact with each other frequently, if at all. As a result, when an incident occurs, valuable time can be lost trying to bring together the correct combination of systems and people to create a solution. Going forwards these issues will only become more difficult to address as the threat landscape continues to morph and evolve. 

To protect long-term success, CISOs need to invest now in implementing a single view with clear overarching visibility to manage the multiple functions of security across technology environments quickly and efficiently. By creating a single ‘pane of glass’ view, they will be able to rapidly detect and address issues as they arise and in turn fuel the agility needed to balance risk and innovation in today’s digital economy.

Security leaders play a key role in accelerating digital transformation for long-term success. By proving risk to justify action through a single overview of business operations, CISO are able to balance risk with innovation and growth to drive their business forwards.

 

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