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When CISOs Lose Their Jobs: The Skills and Competencies Required for the Evolving CISO Role



While an incident might leave some CISOs fearing for their jobs, the opposite may be true and that it may have benefits to both your career and personal health. A study by Goldsmiths University of London and Symantec surveyed over 3,000 security decision makers across France, Germany and the UK and found that going through a data breach can have a positive effect.


It's easy for companies to scapegoat their CISO following a breach. These executives are in charge of maintaining a safe and sound network. But everyone in security knows cyber events are a matter of if, not when.




When CISOs Lose Their Jobs…



More and more companies are hiring Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) to navigate the rough waters of cybersecurity. The need for CISOs in enterprise organizations is at the height of importance with the increase in both ransomware attacks and data breaches. Again, we're not going to be the first ones to tell you that the days when third-party data breaches, ransomware, and other forms of cyberattacks were rare are gone. Cyberattacks have an observable, but rarely reported effect on CISOs. With the almost daily data breaches, CISOs are realizing that there is a huge target on their back when (not if!), a data breach occurs.


When a breach or ransomware attack occurs, consumers want to see that the person responsible for the attack is held accountable. Breaches are often the fault of an institutionalized failure of policy and not that of a single individual, however, because the policy often falls to the CISO, a CISO may lose their job in order for an organization to preserve their reputation with its consumers. Hence, the average 18-month ticking clock. Not only does a CISO have to worry about their actions, but they are also accountable for their team if it were to fail to detect or respond properly to a breach. CISOs are also expected to manage issues external to the company (e.g. those faults of a partner or third-party vendor) as well. Imagine an example where a third-party weakness is found that allows a bad actor to get into a network and cause measurable harm. A CISO will, more likely than not, be held accountable for this security failure. Worse still, are the outliers: like the story of the Uber CISO participating in a data breach cover-up. A breach looks bad enough for a company, but a cover-up can destroy an entire company's reputation.


So, where does this stress that is hitting the CISO so hard come from? Largely the lack of engagement with the C-Suite and the board would appear to be the answer. The Nominet research found that only 52% of CISOs felt executive teams valued the security team, at least from the revenue and brand protection perspectives. Nearly 1 in 5 (18%) said that board members were 'indifferent' to the security team and even consider them an inconvenience. Engaging with the C-suite has historically been something of a mountain for the CISO to climb, but one would have hoped that in the cybersecurity-aware environment we work in today that had changed. It would appear not. Only 60% of CISOs felt that the CEO agreed a breach was an inevitability, something that 99% of cybersecurity professionals will likely insist is the case. Think that's bad enough? Wait for this: a third of CISOs think that if a breach occurred they will face an official warning or lose their jobs. The U.K. (37%) is slightly worse than the U.S. (28%) in piling this pressure onto the CISO role.


"It's no surprise that CISOs are facing burnout" Russell Haworth, CEO at Nominet says, continuing "many lack support from within their organizations and senior business leaders need to face the facts: the threats are real and CISOs need to be given the resources and support to tackle them." Support, both in terms of physical and mental health, is one of the things that never really seems to get talked about much when it comes to the C-suite. Once you have climbed to that level of leadership within the business you are seen as being somehow immune to such things. This has got to change if we are ever to reduce the skills gap in the cybersecurity world, if we are ever to attract and more importantly retain the right caliber of individual to lead a business through the threatscape. The retention problem is evidenced by the research which suggests the average job length for a CISO is now less than three years for 55% of those taking part, less than two years for 30%.


With the ever-growing list of cybersecurity threats and the constant vigilance required to stay ahead of them, it's easy to lose sight of what CISOs should prioritize. In addition, there are many technologies, services, and approaches to consider when planning a security strategy. Fortinet Field CISOs, Jaime Chanaga and Daniel Kwong, offer some advice for CISOs to keep top of mind when reviewing their security posture as well as recommendations to avoid falling victim to the ever-expanding threat environment.


Your business is unique. There is no cookie-cutter solution for all of your IAM needs. Managed Identity-as-a-Service helps you provide your customers with the same convenience at work they expect when accessing their favorite applications at home. Maintain transparency while increasing customer satisfaction. IAM can be complex. Our Managed Identity-as-a-Service makes the complex simple.


CIAM makes people feel safe when interacting with your website while providing a seamless user experience. If your customers are worried about remembering their password or are concerned that your sign-on is not secure, they will go somewhere else. You lose revenue, and you lose brand loyalty. Eventually, you will no longer be competitive.


In CyberSecurity, many professionals self-medicate, the number growing in recent years. As professionals lean on these unhealthy habits, they lose their ability to focus, to fall into the flow state where their best work is done, and allow a vicious cycle of stress and coping to continue. The Zensory is the first step in hacking your habits to help rather than harm you.


Binaural beats are auditory illusions. Two different sounds are played into either ear using headphones at different frequencies. Your mind hears this and instead of either frequency it imagines it is listening to the difference between the two frequencies. This means that, instead of actively listening to music and becoming distracted by its high and lows, you are subconsciously stimulating optimal brain frequencies to improve your mood whenever you want to. On their own, these beats can be grating rather than focusing for some people. But, by layering over calm, rhythmic music and relaxing naturescapes, The Zensory creates an experience which removes anxiety from people in even the most stressful jobs.


On the other hand, if we take a closer look at IT security budget developments, most CISOs manage to get increasing budgets regardless of the maturity of security markets or the economic situation in their geography. The situation is only worrisome in CIS, where 15% of the CISOs surveyed report declining budgets.


Too often security teams do a great job at identifying and pointing out risks and then handing them off to others to solve. In their earnest desire to eliminate those risks, they forget how important it is to understand how people go about getting their work done. So, rather than try to help others deliver their work or projects in a secure way, they identify risks and throw them over the fence for other teams to fix. That has to stop. We need to create partnerships, build empathy and become part of the solution. Building empathy helps us understand how others deliver work and the struggles they might go through to get their jobs done. 2ff7e9595c


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