CIO OPINION

Gerald Beuchelt, CISO at Acronis

CISOs should build strong internal relationships. Your effectiveness as a CISO grows when you are seen as a strategic advisor embedded in the business, not just as a technical gatekeeper. Treat your security stack as a living system. Regularly audit, refine, and adapt it instead of letting it sprawl unchecked.

and skill factor many used to bring to the table out of the equation. Unfortunately, this is also creating very lazy people, who are depending on AI to do their job.

Many CISO’ s are still challenged with budget restraints. While there are very few that have an open budget, many CISOs are still fighting for every dollar they get. Then they must decide where to spend it and it is never enough. While CISOs position business risks to boards, they still never get everything they need, until, they are breached or have an incident. We see this many times over; once an incident or breach occurs, magically budgets close the gaps and safeguards are implemented.

A key limitation for CISOs is the lack of automation. Many security operations still rely heavily on manual processes, making it difficult to counter fast-moving threats like credential-stuffing bots. Understaffed teams struggle to respond to incidents in real time.

CISOs want proactive channel partners and vendors who anticipate needs rather than merely react and focus on delivering a solution instead of a technology stack. CISOs are looking for contextualised threat intelligence tailored to their specific environments. Additionally, there is a rising demand for vendor transparency, particularly around their own security posture and supply chain integrity.

One of items that is resonating with CISOs is visibility. If CISOs do not know a risk exists, how can they protect against it. Visibility is key. Solutions that offer more visibility into risk awareness is music to CISO’ s ears, across the entire enterprise. Solutions that help uncover risk and potential risk effectively and efficiently are helping CISOs sleep better at night.

Ram Narayanan, Country Manager, Check Point Software Technologies, Middle East

To improve resilience, enterprises should adopt solutions that prioritise automation, allowing human analysts to focus on higher-value tasks and respond more efficiently during threat surges.

One major challenge is the ongoing need to justify security investments in terms of business value through a risk lens. CISOs need to enable the business to make hard choices balancing business and security risks.

Christopher Hills, Chief Security Strategist, BeyondTrust

In modern cybersecurity, if you know how to run an AI prompt or prompt AI for what you need, it is taking the knowledge

Enterprise CISOs are under growing pressure as the security landscape continues to shift and expand. From managing complex cloud environments to securing a remote and mobile workforce, the challenges they face are both technical and strategic. A major issue lies in juggling too many disconnected tools, which often leads to limited visibility and slower response during incidents.

Regulatory demands are increasing, but resources rarely follow suit. On top of that, the shortage of experienced professionals makes consistent protection difficult to maintain. As a result, today’ s decision makers are expected to do more with less.

CISOs and IT security leaders must possess a blend of technical expertise and strategic insight to safeguard organisations in today’ s environment. Mastery of cloud

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