How to Make Cyber Relevant to Your CEO’s Decision-Making Process
According to this survey, 87% of CEOs still struggle to assess the effectiveness of cyber investments and when it comes to making decisions on cyber issues, CEOs face some challenges in the following areas:
- Metrics that lack meaning or context: 72%
- Information isn’t timely: 51%
- Reports only arrive during a crisis: 50%
This makes it difficult to develop the relationship between IT and Cyber that both parties need for an effective and speedy CEO decision-making process.
How important is cyber to a CEO?
Cybersecurity has never been more important to CEOs than now; it’s a big part of their responsibility. As a matter of fact, a report from Gartner has indicated they think CEOs may become personally liable for 75% of cyber-related incidents in the company.
This risk ownership shift is significant and is making cyber (and the risk related to it) a critical aspect of the CEO job role. So why does it feel like CEOs aren’t getting the visibility they need to make these decisions, and be confident to take this ownership?
Unfortunately, as the data above mentions, many CEOs have no visibility on what cyber really is. They are often forced to make decisions despite it being a black box they can’t see into, or the CEO decision-making process is lengthy and difficult as a result. But given that CEOs may become liable for any cyber-attacks in the near future, they need to have a better understanding of their cybersecurity strategy to enable them to make the right decisions and protect the business.
At Boardish, our platform, as well as our services are designed to empower Cyber AND CEOs and quantify cyber into a metric that can be understood at a business level.
How do we do this?
1. Turn the intangible into tangible
Using Boardish, CEOs get visibility on cyber from a BUSINESS perspective using financial risk, with clear metrics that are relevant (solution ROI, how much of the company’s assets are at risk, what level of efficiency are solutions at, where the blind spots are, potential profit loss, regulatory fines, and number of employees that would be affected).
We aren’t looking at probability, we look at what’s already happened in your organization, how effective things are, and what this costs. Just like every other department in the business. We’re turning the intangible nature of cyber into tangible.
2. Keep it relevant
A CEO doesn’t need to look at logs, asset reports, or in many cases a full solution breakdown. That’s what they pay the CISO/CTO/Cyber manager for. Keep the message clear for what your CEO needs. Boardish provides multiple dashboards for different audiences so you can filter out the unnecessary technical data (which is still available for due diligence) which can muddy the water and confuse the conversation.