The role of the CIO reached a turning point several years ago, as the crucial role data plays in successful cybersecurity strategies became more widely understood. This shift has pushed CIOs to have much higher visibility in the business, significantly increasing the pressure of their role. In this environment, CIOs must align their priorities with the needs of their organization, which can be a challenge in an ever-changing security landscape.
Three priorities will form the basis of any CIO’s successful strategic approach this year. First, CIOs will benefit from the rise of Generative AI recommit each team within their organization to instill a security-first mindset. Second, CIOs need to examine their organization’s data to ensure it’s ethically generating value. Third, as security budgets begin to slow after years of hypergrowth, CIOs must optimize their security processes to extract more value from existing investments.
- Develop an organization-wide security mindset
As generative AI becomes more proficient and widespread, its CEO and board of directors are asking every CIO if they have a strategy to ensure it poses no security risks. While security teams have been using AI for data summarization and pattern recognition for several years, other teams, such as legal or marketing teams, may be less mature in their adoption of AI.
This knowledge gap needs to be filled, and this should be a major priority. CIOs should have a robust training program in place to educate each team on their security obligations and ensure they are always considered in any project. This will provide each team with the foundational knowledge they need to understand why security can change processes or entirely new approaches to key business processes.
It is important that this information is available to each team to foster a sense of community around safety. After all, when an attack on a single employee can result in large-scale data breaches or significant financial damage, it’s important for CIOs to ensure everyone in their organization is aware of their data obligations. of security.
- Clean your data to see the true value
Data management and protection is an overlooked – but crucial – part of security. As individuals have become more data savvy, they demand more data to inform decision-making processes.
However, data management as a critical asset lags behind and is regularly treated as a security afterthought. In practice, this means that the streamlining, cleaning and securing of data is sub-optimized, creating another level of vulnerability within organizations.
Managing data can be a time-consuming process, but there is a checklist that CIOs can use to ensure their priorities are correct. They need to know where their data is stored, how it is found, defined and how it is secured. Once these steps are completed, CIOs can assess the trustworthiness and context of their data, and question whether it is being used ethically.
By following this checklist, organizations can ensure they are generating real value with their data to drive revenue, support customers, and help employees be more productive.
- Optimize your spending to protect your organization
Security budgets have increased significantly over the past decade. This trend is now starting to slow, and even if budgets are not yet decreasing, they are starting to stagnate. This shift requires CIOs to make significant efforts to optimize their security spending, not necessarily to do more with less, but to demonstrate that greater value can be derived from the same security resources.
To demonstrate the value of their security work, CIOs must contextualize their organization’s risk posture. This requires them to ask themselves what their organization’s risk tolerance is, and then develop a plan for how to support that level of risk, the timeline, and how their budget will affect that timeline. This helps CIOs make a business case for their security budget in terms their board can appreciate. It can also help show CIOs their security journey, assessing risks by priority and addressing them in that order.
To address these risks, it is essential that IT departments establish a minimum annual security budget covering the needs of their organization. These expenses can then be optimized to implement a security strategy with high business impact.
2024 is the year of business impact for CIOs
CIOs must be clear and unemotional about the security risks their business poses. This will allow them to accurately assess and clearly document areas where improvements are needed, enabling them to drive operational changes across the organization.
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