A Clear Cyber Security Path for a New CISO: Check Out These 5 Steps

In every organization, the role of a Chief Information Security Officer or a CISO is dynamic and extremely challenging. The industry and landscape that CISOs serve bring forth a range of perplexing and difficult scenarios. As a result, they need to strategically take on this responsibility and move towards a valuable cyber security implementation. This should be triggered by thoughtful leadership and foundational strength of the CISO role.

Below we have discussed how a CISO can strategically lay a strong foundation for the secure organization. Read more for details.

1. Understand Business Assets

The major goal of every organization is to manage the security breaches and their impact on operational assets of the organization, including devices, people, applications, information, networks, vendors, and facilities. These assets are prone to threats and we eventually end up controlling the security structure of these assets only.

Hence, it seems logical to have a fair knowledge of asset inventories of the organization. Having clear and accurate data related to these asset inventories help in gauging the total cost of security management. Through quality inventories, you can control the budget, security, and performance of the security.

When these asset inventories are not correctly managed, it introduces critical errors in KPIs, performance metrics, and reporting.

2. Evaluate Your Control Portfolio

As a CISO, you should combine strategic elements, such as stated above, and understand the impact on the business. Therefore, you should ask questions similar to:

• What are the cyber security controls of the organization?
• On which threat surfaces we have placed these security controls? Is every surface covered equally or there’s a differentiation?
• Which surface assets have these security controls? Are these offering full coverage?

Now, these can lead to further questions, such as which security controls are under or overbuilt?

The reason for these evaluations is to understand your strengths and weaknesses. This is only achievable by creating a clear communication line between your security program and executive leadership, which would help in evaluating the risk areas of the organization.

3. Analyze your Must-Haves

Analyze and understand your assets, security controls, control deployments to resources, projects, and services.
Now, you need to have all of the above. These are your must-haves. Match these with what you already have.

When you have clear and accurate data on your must-haves, you would be able to strategically plan and prioritize your resources request, budget, and reallocations. It would help in identifying opportunities related to your current resources; such as efficiency when these resources are decreased or increased.

Simply put, the better you are able to understand your capabilities and tactical resources, the better you have the power to strategically grab opportunities.

4. Be an Evangelist

As a CISO, you are most visible to every organizational vertical. This means that to maintain the security structure, you need to consistently work with designers, operational teams, and developers.

Utilize this opportunity and make everyone a security officer. Extend your influence, guide your teams, and technologically help them understand what goes into the deep security architecture of the organization. Strong communication can help you address a lot of your critical security components quite easily.

5. Enhance Strategic Management

Every CISO should support their team for strong information security management. Here’s how:

• Closely collaborate with the executive leadership team of the organization to ensure that risk posture and strategic planning are aligned.
• Evaluate and understand the technical projects of the business to ingrain security in the development lifecycle of the project.

Plan modifications in the current architecture and continuously implement these changes to stay relevant to your information security program.

Conclusion

There’s no doubt in the fact that security regulations evolve and so does the methods of managing it. However, the above steps are timeless. With the right execution and consistent transformation, you can become a better CISO and improve your organization’s security structure. The above skills are necessary. These skills can help you move towards the mission-critical security goals of the organization.