The Cyber Defense eMagazine January Edition for 2024

Communication Within the C-Suite
Due to the specific nature of their respective roles, CISOs and other C-suite executives often find
themselves focusing their time and attention on separate, distinct parts of business. However, the siloed
nature of these individual priorities can prevent organizations from establishing and maintaining complete
awareness of the severity of potential cyber risks. To effectively prevent a situation like what happened
at SolarWinds, clear and consistent communication between CISOs and C-suite executives like CFOs is
essential.
Without the presence of constant communication between CISOs and C-suite leaders, there is no way
to ensure that everyone is on the same page. The challenge is that they usually speak with different
jargon, and more often than not they deal with conflicting topics. But that should not be the case. The
implications of cyber risks are not limited exclusively to security-related concerns; we’ve now seen how
these risks can rapidly develop into massive legal and financial issues. As a result, it is imperative to
foster open dialogue on a continuous basis so that security concerns are explicitly disclosed to all
members of an organization's C-suite, ensuring that they are fully aware of the presence and severity of
cyber risks, and how these risks can snowball into situations that directly impact the operations of each
executive’s respective role and detrimentally impact the organization’s bottom line.
Speaking the Same Language
One of the biggest barriers to communication between CISOs and C-suite executives is the complexity
of communicating cyber risks and potential implications in a way that makes sense to individuals from
non-security backgrounds. This is particularly important for CISOs and CFOs, who must collaborate on
a continuous basis to analyze and evaluate the relationships between potential cybersecurity incidents,
the associated legal and financial implications and the prioritization of cybersecurity investments based
on ROI and positive impact on risk mitigation.
To facilitate this process, organizations can leverage cyber risk quantification and management tools
(CRQM) that congregate data to calculate, quantify, and translate information about threats and
vulnerabilities into more digestible language and data. This simplifies the ability to have critical
conversations between CISOs and other C-suite members, which ensures organizational alignment.
Once CISOs and other business leaders like CFOs can speak the same language and relate to one
another and their priorities, it facilitates the ability to align their priorities and goals to support the
organization as a whole, providing them with the comprehension necessary to implement risk mitigation
strategies that are based on data, evidence, and outcomes that are relevant to each respective leader
and sector of business. Not everything is about vulnerabilities and firewalls, and not everything is just
about return on a specific investment in stand-alone basis. A targeted investment in an expensive firewall
upgrade can protect you from a massive lawsuit post incident and yield immeasurable ROI in terms of
risk mitigation.
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