Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 48 | Page 18

LATEST INTELLIGENCE 90 DAYS: A CISO’S JOURNEY TO IMPACT HOW TO DRIVE SUCCESS PRESENTED BY C hief. Information. Security. Officer. The person in charge of protecting an organization’s information assets. The job title sounds so simple, even straight forward, and once upon a time it might have even been an accurate description of the role. It used to be enough to make sure all patches were up to date, network firewalls were in place, intrusion detection set-up, anti-virus installed, and everything on the network properly configured, locked down, and hardened. Download whitepaper here Being a CISO was primarily technical in nature, but times have changed. Realistically, the only thing unchanged about the CISO job is the title. Today, the responsibilities and skill-set required of a contemporary CISO have become much broader, all encompassing, and far more critical to the smooth running of the business. CISOs often require familiarity with new and highly sophisticated technologies such as Software Defined Networking, DevOps, Serverless, Containerization, 18 INTELLIGENTCIO IoT, Virtualization, Machine Learning, and Next-Gen everything in order to protect them. Not to mention The Cloud and all of its many facets. Then there is an ever expanding attack surface created by an explosive number of new users, more data, and more devices needing to be safeguarded. The threats to the enterprise posed by organized cyber- crime, nation-state actors, and even hacktivists are very real and an ever present way of life – 24x7x365. Then many CISOs have to interact not only with their internal teams on technical matters, but also with the board of directors, journalists, regulators, politicians, customers, vendors, and partners on a wide variety of business level issues. The role of a CISO is certainly not for the faint of heart, but the multifaceted demands of the role are also why many find it so attractive. Perhaps the best part of being a CISO job is change. Every day there is something different going on. The business is developing new products and services with new technologies, the attack techniques the www.intelligentcio.com