Year after year, the cybersecurity industry evolves in the types of attacks security professionals need to prepare for and in the options that they have to combat the threats. New security tools are added to the arsenal of solutions at hand, yet when it comes to the challenges CIOs worry about, those have not changed.
A recent rundown of trends that keep CIOs up at night shows that companies are facing almost exactly the same challenges from years ago, before cybersecurity was something widely discussed outside the industry and amongst security professionals (like it is today).
Here’s a look at what these worries are and one of the ways CIOs can combat them moving forward.
Maintaining security while adopting new trends
With the growth in the Internet of Things (IoT), businesses have added to the security concerns that come with adopting new trends that serve to increase the effectiveness of their business day-to-day operations. While, the first concerns CIOs had (way back when) solely revolved around the adoption of cloud and BYOD and could be managed through policies and procedures set up within the enterprise; now with IoT there’s very little room for this type of solution. As IoT evolves, so has to evolve any type of security measure a company decides to take for IoT devices.
Budget
When breaches were at the beginning of their journey, it was unknown how much they would cost businesses that didn’t have the proper cybersecurity posture in place. Today, we know that breaches can cost companies 9-figure sums in damage, even one major breach alone; and downtime and speedy containment just makes the costs worse. Even though costs are clear today, companies continue to have a hard time allocating the necessary budget for an effective security posture.
Staff and experience
It’s no news that there’s a major skills gap and shortage going on within the cybersecurity space. Companies hire IT security pros that have relative experience within the field and some get training, while others don’t; other times businesses hire one of their in-house IT professionals because they need to fill the role for one or more compliance requirements and can’t find someone on the outside. These options put companies at a major disadvantage even with the proper training for those hirers. The skills gap is due to various reasons, one of which, cybersecurity being somewhat of a new field, and there being only so many experts to go around with the necessary years of experience to ensure they are exemplar in their CIO role.
Avoiding mistakes
When it comes to avoiding mistakes there are so many that burden CIOs and not all of them are directly a consequence of their not trying to do the right thing. Between the lack in recurring employee training for phishing emails due to reduced budgets; to not practicing the business continuity plan set because of the inability to coordinate it with everyone within the enterprise (including the the higher up); to enforcing BYOD and cloud policies and procedures with uncooperative employees; CIOs have their hands full.
These four recurring CIO nightmare worries can be overcome if companies finally made cybersecurity a part of the business process; if companies were to set up an Information Security Steering Committee (ISSC), which enables everyone needed to get onboard and fix the issues with budget, training, skills gap, and so on.
Cybersecurity is only going to get more important to the success of a business, the sooner it’s onboarded holistically and with it being seen as a part of the business process, the sooner CIOs, and CEOs, will be able to sleep at night.
Let’s talk about how we can help you get to a place where you no longer have to continuously face the same security nightmare worries over and over again.
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