PERHAPS THE MOST IMPORTANT STEP SECURITY LEADERS CAN TAKE IS TO ELEVATE CYBERSECURITY TO A STRATEGIC PRIORITY.
INDUSTRY WATCH
Cybersecurity is no longer just a technical issue. It is a core business imperative. It protects data, enables continuity, safeguards reputation, and ensures compliance. It allows organisations to take risks and grow with confidence.
Despite its growing importance, many security leaders still struggle to secure investment and recognition from the board. A key reason is that security is still too often communicated in technical terms. While security leaders talk about vulnerabilities, threat vectors, and compliance frameworks, board members are concerned with revenue loss, operational disruption, customer trust, and shareholder value.
This disconnect prevents the board from seeing cybersecurity as a business enabler. It also leaves CISOs without a clear mandate or sufficient resources. To bridge the gap, security leaders must learn to speak the language of business.
That means linking cyber risk to business impact, using data to show how security protects value, and demonstrating how it contributes to the organisation’ s long-term resilience.
Metrics
Cybersecurity has often been seen as a cost centre because its value is hard to quantify. The board wants to understand if the business is secure and how secure it is compared to peers. Security leaders need to answer those questions using metrics that resonate with business stakeholders.
That starts with aligning security metrics with business outcomes. Reporting on patching cycles or endpoint alerts is not enough. Instead, CISOs should focus on measures such as mean time to detect, mean time to respond, dwell time, and risk reduction over time. These metrics show how well the organisation can contain and respond to threats and how that capability supports business continuity and customer confidence.
PERHAPS THE MOST IMPORTANT STEP SECURITY LEADERS CAN TAKE IS TO ELEVATE CYBERSECURITY TO A STRATEGIC PRIORITY.
Collaboration
Modern cybersecurity is a team sport. It relies on close collaboration across IT, operations, compliance, and executive leadership. But collaboration requires shared visibility. If teams are working from siloed data or conflicting information, it becomes harder to coordinate response, assess risk accurately, or provide the board with a clear view of security posture.
That is where a unified data platform becomes critical. Organisations need to bring together data from across their digital environment, providing a single source of truth that can be used for detection, investigation, response, and reporting. This allows CISOs to work more effectively with IT and business leaders, align security strategies with operational priorities, and provide clear, data-backed insights to the board.
Resilience
In today’ s environment, no system is ever 100 % secure. That is why boards are increasingly focused on resilience. They want to understand not just whether an organisation can prevent attacks, but how quickly it can recover from them. This is where security leaders can play a key role in shaping enterprise risk strategy.
By focusing on detection, response, and recovery, CISOs can help the organisation minimise downtime, protect critical assets, and maintain operations under pressure. That focus on resilience turns cybersecurity from a defensive measure into a competitive advantage. In sectors like financial services, energy, and telecoms, where disruption has immediate commercial impact, the ability to respond and recover quickly is a powerful differentiator.
Splunk research has found that speed in responding to threats translates to fewer incidents, reduced recovery costs, and less disruption. By benchmarking these metrics against peers and historic performance, security leaders can show where progress is being made and where further investment is needed.
It is also an area where regional organisations are showing real leadership. Middle enterprises are embedding resilience into their security strategy. They are integrating security and observability to detect issues earlier. They are automating response playbooks to act faster.
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