New Roles and Opportunities for CISOs

The pandemic has emphasized the need for cloud readiness and digital modernization among the business leaders of today. This new normal post-pandemic is driving organizations to make decisions faster while maintaining business continuity and ensuring data security. The growing remote work and cloud adoption now bring the Chief Information Security Officer's (CISOs) to ensure protection against the drastic change supporting the digital transformation (DX) and cloud computing initiatives. Technological advancements are providing new opportunities for collaboration between IT and business. As businesses start to grow after the pandemic it is up to the CISO's to make sure that a strong business foundation is built for the markets and companies to sail across these shifts.

Cloud Adoption to Meet Demands

Most of the businesses are shifting towards digitalization and this, in turn, created a demand for cloud adoption thereby raising the cloud spending by 37% to $29 billion in the first half of 2020. And these technological shifts are going to stay in the market expanding new opportunities. But as work becomes more decentralized there also increases the diligence to maintain cyber hygiene by monitoring the threats since organizations are reporting a 47% increase in cyberattacks.

The increase in cloud services demands a cybersecurity-filled culture that can be beneficial in terms of taking care of the risks. This is why most of the CISO's are moving towards a business focus to ensure the execution of new digital initiatives. The new normal has paved a way for a digital transformation CISO who will be responsible for driving cybersecurity by integrating into DX initiatives in all aspects of IT technology especially when coming to public cloud computing.

CISO's Role in Combating Cyber Risks

There is a need for CISO's to work continuously along with the LoB leaders to align business processes to cloud computing, explaining and identifying the shadow IT applications. And because of the high demand most of the companies have hired and are planning to hire a CISO with greater cloud computing skills and another 53% have employed or are planning to hire a business information security officer (BISO) to work with LoB managers ensuring the safe business processes.

The CISO's are responsible for selecting, deploying, and operating the necessary security controls that can enable the business while noting the cyber risks. The main challenge here is to enable an integrated and cohesive security strategy across the technology portfolio. These executives need to rationalize and transform the cloud ecosystems into an integrated and scalable security stack at the same time meeting divergent business requirements. And this requires a high-performance data pipeline for stream and batch data processing, API integration between tools, and process automation for immediate incident response and risk mitigation. Businesses need to inculcate a culture of security first to find the right balance between enabling the use of cloud services and safeguarding sensitive transactions and data.