Cyber and privacy leaders' agenda

CISOs don’t have to advocate for budget as much as they used to. According to the survey, budget, once a top internal challenge, was only ranked sixth out of eight in a list of obstacles. With resources in hand, CISO communications have evolved to focus on cyber readiness and training.

Secure Creators speak the language of the C-suite and boards in conveying the realities of the current moment and the continuous resource demands of the function. They also do a better job organizing training and designing best practices. While only half of respondents say their cyber training is effective, and only 36% are satisfied with non-IT adoption of best practices, this gap closes among Secure Creators, who are more satisfied with best practice adoption. Upskilling current cybersecurity workforces is by far the most popular tactic to prepare for future cybersecurity threats, cited nearly three times more than the next most popular tactic in the survey.

A growing tech stack brings an expanded attack surface. Cybersecurity leaders are building zero trust architectures to deal with the near constant threat posed by attackers.

Zero trust architectures use a mix of technology and protocols to identify and grant access to users within and outside an organization’s network. By default, users are not trusted and are given the least amount of privilege possible within a network. Networks are segmented to prevent widespread access if one wall is breached and barriers like multifactor authentication (MFA) are deployed to make unauthorized access more difficult.

Organizations must adopt technology, but doing so doesn’t mean they have to be less secure.