How CIOs can get on top of cyber risks

The technology landscape continues to evolve. But so does the threat from cyber criminals as hacks and attacks become ever more prevalent, sophisticated and damaging. 

Protecting your existing environment, building resilience and ensuring new technologies are securely adopted are therefore crucial to your role as a Chief Information Officer (CIO). As the security domain evolves, priorities also include ensuring the right roles and responsibilities are allocated across both IT and wider business teams.

The resulting questions for you as a CIO include: 

1Do we understand our ‘mission critical’ business processes and the critical data and technology (applications and cloud/infrastructure) assets that support them? 

This step is the foundation of good cyber risk and resilience management, but is often underestimated or underpinned by too many poor assumptions. Engagement with the business here is critical, to ensure everyone is aligned on what you should be defending. Knowing what you need to restore and by when will also inform your business continuity plans, which are critical to building organisational resilience in the face of the dynamic cyber threat landscape and increasing prevalence of operational resilience challenges. 

2What additional technical capabilities do I need to build into my technology roadmap to facilitate and deliver the cyber strategy? 

Whilst technology is never a silver bullet, you should keep abreast of the latest developments to ensure you have the capabilities to efficiently mitigate modern-day threats. The convergence of Gen AI, the cloud and (ultimately) quantum computing into integrated security platforms could change the game in the security services market in the years to come. 

In the short term, managing dependencies between your teams is also key to the successful delivery of a cyber security roadmap. For example, we often see contention between infrastructure and security priorities given the number of technical dependencies in implementation efforts. Being clear on the priorities across your IT teams and with your business partners is critical to balancing demand and successful delivery. 

3How do I ensure cyber isn’t just seen as a technology problem and that we’re clear on the cyber responsibilities of the wider organisation?

To deliver security enhancements effectively, it’s also important to ensure that different functions are playing their part, from Finance, HR, Investor Relations and Communications, to the business units themselves, as each will have roles to play across the spectrum of security and resilience capabilities. Establishing a cross-functional security steering committee with accountable owners from each impacted business functions can be a good way to build consensus and alignment. 

How Berkeley can help

At Berkeley, we have experience of helping CIOs answer these questions through all stages of their cyber journey. We can help you to:

• Define your cyber strategy to set clear goals and ensure alignment with business strategy 
• Deliver your cyber transformation programme 
• Deliver cyber resilience capability uplifts in areas such as executive training,  incident response preparation and business continuity planning
• Deliver specific projects in your cyber portfolio that you may be struggling with
• Rebuild and strengthen your cyber capabilities post cyber-attack
• Provide cyber assurance to meet a range of internal and external demands including Section 166 regulatory reviews  
• Engage your executive team, Board and operational stakeholders on how to manage cyber risks effectively and increase your cyber resilience.