With organizations increasingly striving to transform themselves in the post-pandemic business landscape, CISOs should take steps to help them achieve their goals while ensuring they strengthen their cybersecurity posture.
The rapid acceleration of digital transformation initiatives to survive and sustain business operations amidst the COVID crisis has weakened the cybersecurity posture of organizations. In fact, as per the 2019 Accenture report “The Cost of Cybercrime”, even before COVID-19, nearly 68% of business leaders felt their cybersecurity risks were increasing. With the pandemic exposing the security vulnerabilities in 2020 and early 2021, it is has become vital for CISOs to rethink their strategies to strengthen the cybersecurity posture of their enterprises.
However, in order to effectively maximize security, CISOs need more than just technical and leadership skills, they need to understand how their organization operates. Here are few critical initiatives that CISOs should take to focus on post-pandemic and beyond:
- Monitoring Remote Workforce
To survive and potentially thrive in the global health crisis, many organizations were left with no choice but to opt for a remote work environment. While the adoption of the remote working model allowed organizations to protect their employees, CISOs were under extreme pressure to eliminate security vulnerabilities. They were forced to carefully monitor remote VPN connections, endpoints prone to cyber-attacks, form normal patterns and uphold standard security protocols.
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As the effects of the pandemic slowly recede, organizations are increasingly opting for hybrid working environments. Since many industry experts predict that the new model is here to stay, CISOs should implement a robust security awareness program. This will enable them to address the common vulnerabilities, secure the workforce and effectively strengthen the security infrastructure of the organization.
- Strategically Using a vCISO
For a critical requirement, organizations can bring on a virtual CISO that can help them save onboarding time, HR and training costs. These independent, seasoned security professionals can help the organization to add another layer of leadership expertise to their security team. By working alongside a vCISO, CISOs can better educate themselves and formulate effective security policies for their organization.
Also Read: Top Five Roadblocks Faced by CISOs When Handling Enterprise Security
A well-trained and experienced vCISO can help identify areas of improvement. As the needs of every organization are different, they should look for vCISOs who are flexible and can customize a strategy fit to achieve the goals of that particular organization. Additionally, they should also possess leadership qualities as they will be called upon if a major data breach or ransomware event occurs.
- Implement SOAR tools
In today’s post-pandemic enterprise market, organizations are focusing more on business continuity and less on IT resources. This has further increased the load of security teams who already feel overwhelmed. Also, there is FOMI (Fear Of Missing Incidents), resulting in overworking of security analysts who are constantly missing out on work life balance due to too many alerts triggered by various security apps and devices. Thus, CISOs should consider security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) tools to relieve anxiety and fatigue. This will enable the teams to collect threat-related information from various sources and accordingly create a response to the threat. By implementing SOAR, CISOs can reduce and manage the number of security alerts their analysts received.
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