CFOs play a pivotal role in determining a company's cyber health and ensuring cybersecurity investment matches potential risks.
FREMONT, CA: The aftereffects of a disruptive geopolitical conflict affect the unabated inflation cycle. This will continue to impact world economies, but international institutions have several options for redistributing their limited resources. Organisations, however, cannot afford to compromise on cybersecurity as a function.
Giving the staff of the chief information security officer the ability to explain cyber risk in terms and settings that a finance chief can comprehend is an excellent place to start.
This has been a significant barrier for security personnel trying to convince business leaders of their importance. It has never been a top priority on the boardroom agenda to monitor, manage, and reduce cyber risk in a corporate environment.
CFOs are key stakeholders in making informed cybersecurity decisions to accept, reduce, and transfer risk since they have experience quantifying financial risk.
All current regulatory criteria, including recently suggested by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, point to maintaining or expanding cybersecurity spending. Threat actors, as opposed to other features of other technology industries, are its external drivers. It is not surprising that many experts think firms will continue to prioritise investing in cybersecurity even if economies experience a recession.
The difficult task of resource redirection falls to the chief information security officer (CISO) and his team because a downturn in the economy does not necessarily mean that an organisation's attack surface will be reduced. While CISOs will still need to defend their investments, they must also find champions familiar with risk management's complexities.
Two separate teams are responsible for managing and owning risk. The CISO's team is in charge of overseeing cybersecurity risk throughout the organisation, while the CEO, CRO, CFO, and board members are in charge of managing enterprise-wide risk. For an organisation to remain secure in the digital age of trust, these C-suite executive functions must merge deeper.
In contrast to the past, 88 per cent of boards now view cybersecurity as a commercial risk. By showing the financial value lost due to a data breach, quantifying cyber risk can give the lowest common denominator across all levels of decision-making.
Cyber risk exists within and throughout the fundamental organisational structure and additional dynamic components, including staff, outside parties, and technology, scattered across a broad attack surface. It is possible to quantify cyber risk on two different scales: at the macro enterprise level, which considers the potential financial impact that a ransomware attack would have on the company, and at the micro asset and application level, which assumes the possible financial loss resulting from an employee's cyber awareness or lack thereof or decision to invest in a particular cybersecurity product or not.
