4 Metrics That Help CISOs Become Strategic Partners With the Board

Many CISOs experience burnout, and most find it difficult to be recognized as strategic, growth-oriented partners to their leadership team and board of directors.
Challenges CISOs Face When Reporting to the Board It can be hard for CISOs to prove their department's impact to organizational leadership and board members when executives don't have the expertise or context to fully understand information security.
Information about risk and business impact must be presented in a straightforward manner.
4 Key Metrics for CISOs to Share in Board Presentations A well-structured board presentation should start with a summary.
Lay out how the information security program is protecting the company and helping it meet compliance commitments, and present the status of critical workstreams.
Framing your work as a CISO using the following four metrics allows you to share your strategy and accomplishments in a manner that aligns with the most critical parts of every business: risk, growth, expenses, and people.
Risk and Liability Protection Create alignment with the board on the top risks that must be mitigated to protect the company and board from liability and increase the chance of achieving critical business objectives.
During this exercise, it is imperative that the board signs off on the minimum risk threshold for each risk.
Some examples of board-level information security risks include customer data breaches; noncompliance with regulatory laws; nonadherence to security, privacy, and cybersecurity insurance policy contractual commitments; and vendor and supply chain risk.
Short description: Describe the risk in approachable language.
Quantitative residual risk and financial impact score: Use quantitative risk verification techniques to measure the residual risk score for each risk, highlighting whether the likelihood of each risk's potential impact is below acceptable risk thresholds.
Adopting modern solutions that reduce the cost burden of information security workflows can validate how investments in the security program create a larger impact over time.
Revenue Acceleration Most companies need to continually improve their security posture to meet an expanding list of contractual requirements as they grow their customer and partner bases, expand into new markets and geographies, and build new products.
Revenue supported by the InfoSec team per quarter by completing security questionnaires and reviews.
Customer service level agreement trends to show reductions in the time spent to complete customer security reviews.
Vendor SLA trends to show reductions in the time spent to complete vendor security reviews.
Productivity gains from automation compared to manual processes, showing that the information security program is doing more with less.
Enterprisewide Security and Privacy Engagement The proliferation of cybersecurity risk requires strategies that turn security into a team sport.
CISOs can be enablers of a strong security culture by presenting metrics about employee compliance to requirements, such as completing security awareness training and adhering to IT asset security, control, and compliance.
The way for CISOs to be strategic with their board is to showcase a consistent, transparent, and verifiable measure of confidence on how the InfoSec program protects the business from risk and liability, helps accelerate revenue and growth, and reduces costs while increasing productivity.


This Cyber News was published on www.darkreading.com. Publication date: Thu, 07 Dec 2023 15:00:41 +0000


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