CISO: the role of the chief information security officer in modern conditions

The modern Internet has become for users not only an assistant in solving various everyday tasks, a place for organizing work, personal development, but also an environment filled with increased risks and dangers. We have already repeatedly raised the issue of risks that each of us may face when working on the Internet in our reviews, discussed the topic of what they are, cyber wars of the future. All this clearly confirms the fact that every day threats when working on the network are becoming more sophisticated, destructive, and are gaining ever greater proportions.

A comprehensive approach to the implementation of information security will help to withstand the conditions of increased risks, as well as ensure the effective development of your business even in the presence of serious threats. And one of the mandatory components in this direction will be the involvement of the services of a CISO (Chief Information Security Officer), that is, the director of information security. This is the specialist who should be at the disposal of absolutely any company, regardless of the direction of its activity or size. It is necessary to introduce it into the staff of a large corporation and a small enterprise: absolutely all modern business representatives will need competent leaders who can ensure the protection of particularly sensitive business information.

In the conditions of constantly increasing risks, CISO is the specialist who is called upon to ensure the highest level of protection of critical information and company assets from cyberattacks and any unauthorized access in general. But still, what kind of position is this and what kind of radical changes has this profession undergone recently? What professional responsibilities will be assigned to such a specialist? What skills and knowledge do you need to have to become a CISO and what path should you take here?

We will dwell on these issues in detail in today's review. The presented information will help you understand the need to introduce this specialist to your company, and those who are looking for a new direction for their professional activity will get acquainted with a promising direction.

What is a modern CISO like?

In its classic view, the chief information security officer is perceived by many of us as a technical specialist whose responsibilities include the selection, implementation and subsequent management of technological solutions aimed at ensuring high information security indicators. But the practice of recent years shows how much broader the role of the CISO is. Today, the responsibilities of such specialists include a much wider range of daily tasks.

If we analyze the work of most modern Chief Information Security Officers, this will include the development of an information security strategy and its implementation in practice, control of access to information, which is of increased importance for the business. He must also promptly respond to potential threats, monitor incidents that arise and prevent the negative consequences that they conceal.

All this suggests that it is not enough for the CISO to be just a good specialist in his field. It is also important that he has leadership qualities that will allow him to identify weaknesses in the information security of the business, predict potential dangers, risks, and minimize the likelihood of their occurrence in practice.

Along with deep knowledge in the field of system digital technologies, specialized CISO software, he must also know how the security system is built as a whole. One that would ultimately ensure the coordinated and effective work of the entire information security service in the company. He must also be able to develop corporate programs, build strategies, implement them in business processes, taking into account the specifics of the company as a whole.

Main responsibilities of the CISO

A good CISO covers an extremely wide range of tasks facing almost every business. This also includes developing a policy strategy, architecture, and all the procedures that are designed to ensure a decent level of business security. He will also analyze threats, take on risk management, develop and launch a security awareness program for personnel, and subsequently maintain the relevance of all this information. He should also be the first to respond to major incidents in the field of information security, as well as solve a fairly impressive range of related tasks.

As you can see, the range of upcoming work here is extremely extensive. For a more detailed and convenient acquaintance with them, we will make a conditional division into a number of main categories.

Development of a business information security strategy and its implementation

Development of a comprehensive information security strategy within a particular company, its implementation in practice, as well as comprehensive control over the implementation — This is one of the key tasks that a CISO will face in their daily work. But most of these tasks will involve defining standards, security policies, and selecting procedures that can ensure reliable protection of the company's information resources that are of particular importance to the business as a whole. The entire process of developing such a strategy will involve the consistent implementation of a number of stages:

• deep analysis of the current state of business security;
• definition of high-level goals that will form the basis for developing a subsequent strategy;
• integration of relevant security solutions into the company's business processes;
• development of standards, policies, procedures, operational plans, checklists, as well as any other documentation in the field of security with subsequent implementation in practical application;
• definition of approaches, methods on the basis of which the effectiveness of the security measures used will be assessed, as well as their application in practice in order to obtain figures for guidance in subsequent analysis;
• making adjustments to the previously created strategy, plans, adjusting document records, launching new research cycles.

By and large, all this work should not stop for a single day. This is a kind of closed loop that will need to be kept under full control all the time, because this is the only way to keep business information security under control and respond promptly even to potential threats.

Risk management with strict compliance with regulations and requirements

An equally important responsibility of a modern CISO will also be effective risk management. That is, this specialist must clearly understand what problems and dangers his company may face, be able to identify emerging risks, assess them and select the most effective solutions. If you do not pay due attention to risk management, then you simply will not be able to ensure decent information security within the allocated budget, or even assess the feasibility of performing such work.

At the same time, it is imperative to follow current regulations and requirements. At this stage, the company's field of activity, the industry in which it is represented, the region of its professional activity are necessarily taken into account. In most cases, absolutely any company must work on the basis of certain standards, legislative requirements. In particular, the most common solution here is GDPR, ISO/IEC 27001, HIPAA, but there are others. If we talk directly about risk management, then the CISO's responsibilities will include the following work:

• conducting internal audits at pre-established intervals, participating in external audits, making sure that the existing solution complies with legislative norms;
• forming such internal processes of systems that would comply with current regulatory requirements;
• updating security policies and procedures, as well as adapting them in accordance with adjustments implemented in standards and legislation in general;
• forming reports, both internal and external, as well as ensuring all necessary communications related to compliance or how to combat violations of established security requirements.

Responding to incidents that have occurred, their elimination and investigation

A good CISO should understand in advance how to respond to a particular incident in the field of information security. This is what will allow him to immediately launch the process of solving them when problems arise, rather than waste time looking for a suitable solution. Moreover, his responsibilities will include training personnel, checking knowledge. This is what will allow other employees to promptly identify threats, that is, before their negative consequences make themselves known. So, in this case, the work of the CISO will include the following actions:

• development of incident response plans and their practical implementation;
• active participation in restoring the functionality of internal systems and processes that have been affected by Internet intruders;
• coordinating the work of other specialists and teams in the event that an incident in the field of information security is identified;
• active participation in restoring the functionality of all systems and tools affected by the incident;
• communication with the relevant services, documenting incidents, reporting, working on troubleshooting, launching post-incident measures and performing related work.

But the CISO's responsibilities are not limited to this. Along with the main tasks, this specialist will also face a number of related issues in his daily practice.

Additional responsibilities of the CISO

Practice shows that one of the most important roles in ensuring business information security is played directly by the human factor. It is the company's employees who must be extremely vigilant and attentive in their daily work to any unforeseen situations, uncharacteristic behavior of the system, a particular tool or even a colleague. This means that the information security director must regularly conduct training for staff, talk about what methods of recognizing vulnerabilities and cyber threats exist at the moment, teach them to prevent or at least minimize risks. Here it is important to come up with specific methods of encouraging employees who pay special attention to business security, to understand how to form a security culture within a specific team, and then promote the most effective means and methods of ensuring security.

Thus, the additional responsibilities of the Chief Information Security Officer should include:

• conducting specific audits, security assessment and testing of individual departments, specialists, servers, applications and any other business assets;
• regular monitoring of security events and their strategic management, threat intelligence;
• comprehensive access control and user identification;
• coordination of all changes that other specialists want to launch in the company's IT infrastructure, the source code of the software used;
• general security management of all supply chains, as well as interaction with external parties to the business;
• selecting the most suitable software and hardware in the field of information security, its implementation in the business, subsequent administration;
• Direct management of the physical security of the information infrastructure, whether it is the protection of server equipment, mobile devices used, participation in the selection, implementation of video surveillance and access control systems, as well as solving many related problems.

In practice, it turns out to be not so easy to cover this entire range of work. It requires deep professional and technical knowledge, as well as personal qualities, a special mindset and character. It is important to be flexible when working with other employees, to know how to correctly prioritize, choose the right interests and goals. That is, becoming a good CISO may not be as easy as it initially seemed. We will dwell on the qualities of such a specialist in more detail below.

Qualities, knowledge, skills that will help you become a good CISO

If you consider the wide range of work that the information security director will have to perform on a daily basis, it becomes clear that such a specialist must have fairly extensive knowledge in the field of IT, cybersecurity. Moreover, given the constant transformation of threats, the expansion of the range, tools, you will have to constantly learn, improve, develop. That is, you need to be constantly aware of current trends, know how to adapt them to the specifics of a particular business, thereby ensuring a decent level of protection and readiness for new threats.

Along with this, CISOs must also have good communication and leadership skills, be able to interact with the audience, both with technical specialists and with higher-level managers, as well as with all other interested parties. Information must be communicated in a structured, clear, understandable way, so that even someone who is far from the field of information security understands how important it is to follow certain rules. This is the only way to ensure a decent level of protection for the company from cyber threats.

Now we will get to know in more detail the main skills that a person applying for the position of chief information security officer must have.

Technical skills of a CISO

Do you want to become a chief information security officer? Then it is important to have the following skills:

1. Deep knowledge of network technologies. You need to understand how network protocols are structured and work, be able to analyze traffic and identify unusual activity in it, manage network access, firewalls.
2. Cryptology. You need to be familiar with the cryptographic algorithms and methods that are relevant today, including AES, RSA, SHA. This is what will help protect data during storage and transmission. You must be able to use cryptanalysis when assessing system security, investigating incidents, and building new strategies.
3. Ability to identify vulnerabilities. To do this, you must know current methods and penetration testing tools, and assess the technical component. You must understand where a vulnerability may be hidden in the architecture, operations, and business processes.
4. Working with large amounts of data. You must understand how to analyze logs in order to restore events and damaged data. You must know regular expressions, be able to transform unstructured data into structured data and vice versa, understand what database security is and be able to manage it.
5. Information security. It is necessary to be able to combine methods of authentication, classification, authorization, inventory, monitoring, encryption, access control. This is what will ensure a decent level of protection for confidential and sensitive information.

Also, we must not forget that the CISO must be aware of all those solutions in the field of information security that are currently being used in practice. He must know how certain software and hardware solutions work, be able to manage information, risks, vulnerabilities. It is necessary to know how to perform a comparative analysis of certain solutions based on a large number of criteria and select an option for implementation that will be optimal in a particular case and taking into account the strategy for future development.

Business qualities of a CISO

To become a good information security director, it is also important to have not only technical, but also certain business qualities, in particular:

1. Organization of teamwork. A CISO will manage a fairly large team of information security specialists. This means that he must plan and organize their actions, provide motivation. And in the work it will be necessary to coordinate the efforts of other departments, and even different companies, ensuring the solution of complex and large-scale tasks.
2. Ability to analyze, manage crises and projects, responsibility for decisiveness. It is necessary to have critical, and in some cases even abstract thinking, to be able to identify complex and non-obvious cause-and-effect relationships, to understand what consequences this or that action, inaction, event may have. It is necessary to be able to act in conditions of uncertainty, independently and independently of other specialists. That is, you will have to take responsibility, especially in critical situations.
3. Communication skills. In their work, these specialists often face the need to interact with different specialists within the same organization and beyond. These may be clients' contractors, partners, and in some cases even the press, law enforcement agencies. And here it is important to be able to structure, present information as correctly as possible, without bias, so that it is easy to perceive. It is also necessary to be able to comprehensively assess the problem, perceive alternative opinions, understand how to correctly conduct negotiations in order to resolve or at least soften the conflict, smooth out sharp corners. At the same time, the work may well be carried out in a multicultural environment, which in itself imposes certain restrictions and is associated with a number of risks.

And with all this, such qualities as adaptability, learning ability, positivity, intuition and the ability to accept risks quickly assess them taking into account costs and benefits, including using informal methods are also important.

Additional CISO skills

Along with technical and business skills, the information security director must also have related knowledge and skills, namely:

1. Economic. It is necessary to assess risks, quantitatively analyze the likelihood of cyber threats and their potential consequences. It is necessary to understand how much the investments made in security will pay off, the ability to prove the need to use certain methods from the point of view of economic security.
2. Business. It is important to be well-versed in the technological processes occurring within a particular company, to be able to build a security structure, literally visualize it from scratch, regularly monitor its effectiveness and take a number of measures aimed at improving the indicators. And it is also necessary to understand how to integrate the developed strategies into general business processes.
3. Legal. Here you should be familiar with the specifics of domestic and international legislation, know the relevant standards in the field of IT and security, be able to correctly present and interpret them in each specific case. It is also important to understand the responsibility for violating such standards. Knowledge in the field of contract analysis will also be useful.

Today, there are many professional training programs that will help you become a good information security director; people who already have certain knowledge and skills in the field of IT can try themselves in this position. As part of the training, you can gain knowledge that will allow you to successfully perform professional tasks and adopt the best global practices in this area.

How to become a CISO: the path to the position of chief information security officer

Practice shows that getting a CISO position is not as easy as it may seem. It requires deep technical knowledge, skills and knowledge in the field of information technology, the ability to effectively manage risks and quickly respond to potential threats, high responsibility, communication skills, flexibility and many other qualities. But if you are sure that you can become a chief information security officer, you will need to implement several key stages that involve acquiring the necessary qualifications and skills. In particular, we are talking about such points as:

1. Education. Even if you have a higher education in computer technology, cybersecurity, you still cannot do without specialized courses. The fact is that the curricula of universities lag behind modern technologies by at least 5 or even 10 years. That is, they will not provide sufficient knowledge to work in this area. Today, you can find decent specialized courses and receive the appropriate certificates that will help you get the job you want. So, some of the most suitable solutions here will be the international CISSP (Certified Information Systems Security Professional) and CISM (Certified Information Security Manager). They indicate a decent level of competence in the field of information security management. Thus, CISSP covers 8 key areas in this industry, including asset security, risk management, security design and architecture, access management, network communications security, testing and security assessment, application security and operational security. Only those specialists who already have at least 5 years of experience in the field of information security after passing the appropriate exam will be able to obtain it. The CISM certificate focuses more on operational strategic management, development of security programs. Here, a mandatory condition will also be five years of experience in this niche and successful passing of the exam.
2. Professional experience. It is not possible to become a chief information security officer from scratch. Having experience will help develop the necessary skills and qualities, will help to better understand the specifics of the upcoming work, learn to navigate in certain infrastructures and industries. That is why most often those who have already encountered similar problems in their practice apply for the CISO position. In particular, these can be system administrators, software developers, network engineers, incident investigation specialists, risk managers, as well as all those who already have basic knowledge in the field of IT services, applications, infrastructure. Thanks to their professional experience, familiarity with the infrastructure as a whole, it will be possible to more quickly and easily develop the necessary skills and ensure high-quality performance of daily tasks.
3. Continuous training. We have already talked about how important it is for a CISO to constantly monitor current trends in the field of information security, implement them in the work processes of your business. In parallel with this, you also need to deeply delve into the specifics of the industries of your clients and employers. The fact is that international certificates will be immediately canceled if their owner does not promptly provide information that he or she improves his or her qualifications annually. In parallel with this, regular participation in conferences, webinars, seminars, and specialized courses will be required. It is also necessary to join professional communities and associations, such as ISACA and SANS Institute, etc. Here you will get access to advanced materials and resources for training, which will allow you to maintain your professionalism at a high level. You will also have to regularly develop your business skills, study specialized literature, scientific articles, and reports from global companies on cybersecurity. This is what will allow you to stay up to date with advanced technologies, protection methods, and effectively interact with subordinates and business leaders.

All these points will form the basis for the formation of a competent and qualified information security director who will be in stable demand among employers. And in this case, you can count on a fairly good level of remuneration. It is clear that long years of training, dedication, and hard work should pay off in practice.

We would also like to draw attention to one point: along with CISO, vCISOs are also represented on the market - virtual information security directors. Their services are increasingly used by modern companies that would like to ensure a high security rating for themselves, but at the same time minimize labor costs. That is, vCISO is the same CISO, but he will work under a contract. Considering that such a specialist will not require payment for health insurance, a package of benefits, pension contributions and other compensations, the costs of paying for his labor will be lower. This means that even representatives of small and medium businesses will be able to afford such a specialist. Their main task within your company will be to build the necessary information security structure and teach personnel to work effectively in it.

If necessary, vCISO services can be scaled, increasing or, conversely, decreasing the amount of work performed by them depending on budget constraints and current tasks. Therefore, think about what format of the information security director will be optimal for your particular case. But the fact is that such a specialist should be at the disposal of any business in modern realities is a fact.

How to choose a worthy CISO: advice for business

Only a person who has the appropriate qualifications and current CISSP or CISM certificates, as well as certain experience in this area, will be able to ensure the necessary level of information security within any business. To navigate the market offers and select a worthy CISO, use the following recommendations:

• Ask the candidate to provide specific recommendations regarding the protection of certain business processes in your company. This will allow you to evaluate not only professional skills, but also to understand whether the candidate has a sense of proportion, how justified his approaches are, including in material terms, what inconveniences for your company's work they can provoke and how critical this is.
• Assess not only technical knowledge, but also the candidate's ability to communicate with the team and management. If there are problems with this, it will be extremely difficult for this person to organize effective management on site.
• Ask other specialists in your company, be it a representative of the HR department, a psychologist, a lawyer, an economist to assess the business qualities of the candidate, his knowledge and skills not only in the context of information security, but also in related areas that he will encounter in practice.
• Assign the applicant to complete a test task. This way you will be able to understand how quickly he can adapt to new requests and threats. As an example, you can take one of the incidents that occurred in the field of information security of your business. Considering what you know about the problem and how it was solved, you will be able to assess the professionalism of the candidate.
• Think about what format of cooperation with the information security director will be optimal for you: permanent or temporary. Perhaps, to begin with, it is worth using the services of a vCISO, assessing the effectiveness of its work, and then think about hiring a CISO.

In any case, you need an executor who is able to ensure a decent level of information security within your company, set up all related systems, train personnel and constantly adapt the existing strategy to current challenges and market trends.

Are there further prospects in the work of a CISO?

Until recently, the position of the Director of Information Security was perceived as the final one. In the career of a specialist working in this field. But today the situation here has undergone certain changes. In particular, if at some point in time you change your mind about working in this direction, then you will not have the opportunity to move on. Here you can highlight 4 additional areas:

1. Launching your own business, including consulting, transition to CTO. This option can be chosen by those CISOs who would like to scale work tasks, go far beyond applied information security, engage in product development, digital transformation, architecture.
2. Formation of a kind of expert center. Any CISO has such deep and diverse knowledge that he can quite well earn money by providing consultations. Young managers can turn to you to find solutions, and novice specialists can turn to you for competent help.
3. Development of the corporate vertical within the company. The knowledge and skills that will be at your disposal, as well as a thorough knowledge of the business structure, decent management skills, flexibility in communication may well be enough for the business manager to see you as a promising assistant. Someone who can take part in making strategic decisions.
4. CSO, that is, chief security officer. This position will cover not only information security, but also internal and economic security, including risk control, third parties, employee verification, integration with legal and HR functions.

Of course, all these areas are quite close to what a CISO does in his daily work, but there are still a number of certain differences, prospects for further career growth, income scaling, and more. In most modern companies, information security directors take on a fairly wide range of work. They play a very important role in shaping the sustainability of a business, in its adaptation to the ever-increasing threats of our time. And absolutely every successful information security director goes through a similar path of evolution today.

Let's sum it up

Of all the professions related to information security, CISO is probably the most demanding in terms of training, basic knowledge, skills, and qualities. But at the same time, it opens up a lot of opportunities for personal and professional development, getting a decent salary and self-realization. But you are unlikely to become a good specialist quickly. It will require quite painstaking and lengthy training, even if you already have certain knowledge and skills in this area.

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