Book Image

Cybersecurity Leadership Demystified

By : Dr. Erdal Ozkaya
Book Image

Cybersecurity Leadership Demystified

By: Dr. Erdal Ozkaya

Overview of this book

The chief information security officer (CISO) is responsible for an organization's information and data security. The CISO's role is challenging as it demands a solid technical foundation as well as effective communication skills. This book is for busy cybersecurity leaders and executives looking to gain deep insights into the domains important for becoming a competent cybersecurity leader. The book begins by introducing you to the CISO's role, where you'll learn key definitions, explore the responsibilities involved, and understand how you can become an efficient CISO. You'll then be taken through end-to-end security operations and compliance standards to help you get to grips with the security landscape. In order to be a good leader, you'll need a good team. This book guides you in building your dream team by familiarizing you with HR management, documentation, and stakeholder onboarding. Despite taking all that care, you might still fall prey to cyber attacks; this book will show you how to quickly respond to an incident to help your organization minimize losses, decrease vulnerabilities, and rebuild services and processes. Finally, you'll explore other key CISO skills that'll help you communicate at both senior and operational levels. By the end of this book, you'll have gained a complete understanding of the CISO's role and be ready to advance your career.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Summary

This chapter has addressed five important roles of a CISO executive. Firstly, we evaluated the IT threat landscape, which entails assessing both the internal and external aspects of the company to identify potential risks and take measures to mitigate them. Secondly, we looked at devising various policies and controls, such as granting various security privileges to users to reduce risk. Thirdly, we considered leading auditing and compliance initiatives whereby the CISO assesses all security aspects of an organization and ensures they comply with regulations and international standards. Then, we touched on how CISOs manage an organization's information security initiatives, such as securing servers and purchasing up-to-date anti-malware programs; and lastly, we explored establishing partnerships with vendors and security experts to enable a CISO to obtain effective software tools for threat identification and mitigation of threats, as well as keeping abreast of current threats in the IT threat landscape.

The next chapter will address various regulations and laws that govern the IT industry that CISOs need to comply with to enable the effective dissemination of their duties. The focus will be on international standards that govern the security of stored data, the transmission of data, and ensuring the privacy of user data.