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The person in charge of protecting an organisation ’ 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 . Being a CISO was primarily technical in nature , but times have changed . Realistically , the only thing uncharged 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 , Containerisation , IoT , Virtualisation , 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 organised cybercrime , 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 bad guys are employing to hack them are advancing , and at any moment the job might kick in to a higher gear should an incident spring up expectedly . If you ’ re not learning and teaching every day , you and your team will quickly fall behind . That ’ s simply the nature of information security in general . •

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