C-Suite & Boardroom Blind Spots While Aligning Cybersecurity Strategy with Business – BSW #363

Looking back on business failures often reveals blind spots that led to lack of understanding, strategic error and missed opportunities. Protiviti’s Jim DeLoach asks: Are the executive team and board aware of the organization’s blind spots?

A lack of common language and understanding between CISOs and CFOs is leaving organisations more vulnerable to cyber attacks. Bridging the communication gap between the CFO and CISO will be crucial for organisations to effectively mitigate cyber risk.

Aligning an organization’s appetite for risk with cybersecurity strategies is a critical challenge CISOs face, one that requires balancing technical controls and business needs. Achieving that balance demands a capacity to adapt to changing risk environments. But as the CrowdStrike outage showed, well-prepared systems can encounter unforeseen issues, highlighting why cybersecurity strategies need to consider the broader implications of the organization’s risk tolerance.

Going into 2025, safeguarding revenue and minimizing business risks must dominate CISOs’ budgets, with investments aligned with business operations driving priorities.

Forrester’s latest budget planning guide for security and risk clarifies that securing business-critical IT assets needs to be a high priority going into next year. “The budget increases that CISOs will receive in 2025 should prioritize addressing threats and controls in application security, people and business-critical infrastructure,” writes Forrester in the report.

CISOs must double down on threats and controls to get application security rights, secure business-critical infrastructure and improve human risk management. Forrester sees software supply chain security, API security and IoT/OT threat detection as core to business operations and advises CISOs to invest in these areas.

Cybersecurity risks are continually growing. CISOs, CIOs, CEOs, and Boards are under immense pressure to manage these threats while simultaneously enabling business success. The challenge is significant, but with the right approach and insights, organizations can achieve greater security and unlock new value that is necessary for sustainability.

The modern workplace demands that executives move away from a command-and-control style and instead adopt a model based on the idea of the leader as a coach. Companies have devoted extensive resources to this effort, in the form of time-intensive training programs and expensive new technologies, but without great success. In this article, the authors draw on their experiences as behavioral scientists and propose a simpler, cheaper, and more-effective approach: Help leaders identify interactions that they’re already having with their employees and work to transform them into coaching moments.

In the grand tapestry of life and business, communication is the thread that weaves everything together. It’s the silent symphony that orchestrates relationships, decisions, and progress. The principles of effective communication are as timeless as they are essential, guiding us to navigate the complexities of human interaction with grace and precision. Here, I distill the most important communication principles, painfully learned through personal and professional life, hopefully ensuring that your words don’t just fill the air but resonate with purpose and get you closer to your goals.