Cybersecurity Solution Innovation Gains New Momentum
By 2025, 40 percent of boards of directors will have a dedicated cybersecurity committee overseen by a qualified board member — that’s up from less than 10 percent today, according to the latest worldwide market study by Gartner.
This is one of several organizational changes Gartner expects to see at the board, management, and security team level, in response to the greater risk created by the expanded digital footprint of organizations during the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to Gartner, the cybersecurity-related risk is rated as the second-highest source of risk for the enterprise — following regulatory compliance risk. However, relatively few directors feel confident that their company is properly secured against a cyberattack.
“To ensure that cyber risk receives the attention it deserves, many boards of directors are forming dedicated committees that allow for discussion of cybersecurity matters in a confidential environment, led by someone deemed suitably qualified,” said Sam Olyaei, research director at Gartner.
While CISOs should experience more scrutiny as a result, they are also likely to receive more support and resources. CISOs must expect executive conversations to shift away from performance and health-related discussions to risk-oriented and value-driven exercises.
Gartner also predicts that by 2024, 60 percent of CISOs will establish critical partnerships with key executives in sales, finance, and marketing — that’s up from less than 20 percent today.
“Effective CISOs realize that heads of sales, marketing, and business unit leaders are now key partners as the use of technology and, subsequently, the incurrence of risk happens outside of IT,” said Mr. Olyaei.
According to Gartner, top-performing CISOs regularly meet with three times as many non-IT stakeholders as they do IT stakeholders — and they meet with them more frequently than bottom performers.
For asset-intensive enterprises such as utilities, manufacturers, and transportation networks, IT security threats targeting cyber-physical systems present an increased risk to the whole organization.
Bad actors increasingly target weaknesses wherever they are, as demonstrated by the surge in ransomware affecting organizations’ operational systems and recent supply chain attacks.
The siloed nature of today’s security disciplines then becomes its own risk and a liability to the organization, and the IT-centric focus of most security teams needs to expand to include threats in the physical world.
Gartner predicts that by 2025, 50 percent of asset-intensive organizations will converge their cyber, physical, and supply chain security teams under one chief security officer role that reports directly to the CEO.
Gartner research conducted pre-COVID-19 pandemic found that 61 percent of organizations surveyed were struggling to find and hire qualified and experienced IT security professionals.
Outlook for Cybersecurity Solution Innovation
As organizations shifted to ‘remote working’ in response to the global pandemic, it proved that some, if not all, security capabilities could be delivered remotely. This includes security monitoring or operations, policy development, security governance and reporting, security awareness, and incident response via dispersed teams.
Gartner recommends that security and risk leaders consider adapting their operating models and expand their job advertising to gain access to job candidates residing outside of their organization’s traditional recruitment geographies.