“The Mind of the CISO”, a new research paper from Trellix surveyed global chief information security officers (CISOs) across every major industry to reveal how they work amid a tumultuous threat landscape, which business functions hold them back, and what they need to be successful.
“Our research shows CISOs are motivated by a mission to protect,” says Bryan Palma, CEO of Trellix. “Yet, CISOs tell us they feel unsupported, unheard, and invisible. I’ve been a CISO, it can be the loneliest position in tech.
“Now is the time, with AI in the hands of both good and bad actors, to revolutionise SecOps strategies and fight back against criminals,” Palma adds. “We need to empower our CISOs to win every time.”
The research revealed key pain points CISOs experience including:
* Not enough support. 96% struggle to get support from the executive board for the resources needed to maintain cybersecurity strength. Nearly half think their jobs would be easier if all employees across the entire business were better aware of the challenges of cybersecurity. In addition, one third of CISOs cite a lack of skilled talent on their team as a primary challenge.
* The pressure is high. 86% have managed a major cybersecurity incident once, and four in 10 more than once. Seventy-two percent of respondents feel fully or mostly accountable for the incidents, and 43% experienced major attrition from the Security Operations team as a direct result. “It’s quite stressful because it is something where we say you have to be right all of the time. The bad guys only have to be right once …” says a CISO of a US-based healthcare organisation.
* Working with too many of the wrong solutions. With organisations reporting using an average of 25 individual security solutions, 30% say a top hurdle is having too many pieces of technology without a sole source of truth. CISOs can find the number of security solutions available to them overwhelming, unnecessary, and challenging.
* The right solutions would make a difference. 94% agree having the right tools in place would save them considerable time. Forty four percent want access to a single integrated enterprise tool to optimise security investments.
“We get tool exhaustion at some places where money is just thrown at tools and they’re only using a quarter of it,” says a CISO in the US public sector. “So having a unified security tool, that’s been built and understood by security people and CISOs and analysts and engineers, that understand their day-to-day work and activities when it comes to certain things is, I think, something that’s missing…”
According to Carlo Bolzonello, country lead for Trellix in South Africa, the electricity crisis poses a significant and growing challenge across all sectors and organisations’ ability to maintain system integrity and security when the country’s grid undergoes daily load shedding.
“Power insecurity is a challenge CISOs are facing in the South African space as this has an impact on how to secure networks and remote users who may not have stable, continuous power,” he says. “For some, this is making the journey to cloud a sprint – and that inherently leads to mistakes and short-cuts that can end up compromising customers and their users.”
Fabien Rech, senior vice-president of Trellix EMEA, adds: “Faced with an increasingly complex and ever-evolving threat landscape, CISOs are often under-resourced and stretched too thin. This causes significant stress amongst 40% of SecOps teams across EMEA, with 43% experiencing major attrition as a result. As an industry, we have seen an observable bleed of talent as cybersecurity professionals are being asked to do more with less.
“These issues are front and centre for CISOs but, surprisingly, the vast majority in EMEA (95%) experience a lack of support at the board level despite executives recognising the importance of cybersecurity,” Rech says. “While CISOs are responsible for protecting company data – and by extension, profitability, and reputation – they can’t be expected to do it alone. Executives need to recognise these pain points and invest in the right resources – from hiring talent to integrating new security technology, if they are to support CISOs and their teams.”