Quorum Cyber has released its first whitepaper, ‘Mastering Cost Management and Reduction: A Guide for Chief Information Security Officers’. The 15-page paper’s aim is to help CISOs to better manage their budgets and maximise their resources.

CISOs carry a huge burden on their shoulders. Many of them feel under pressure, alone and isolated with the responsibility of managing the cyber security of a whole organisation. In an era when cyber threats are more frequent than ever and cybercriminals are becoming more sophisticated, it’s not if but when a cyber-attack will impact their company.

The guide covers a range of topics in the following chapters:

• The cyber security threat landscape
• The myriad challenges faced by CISOs today
• Overseeing cyber risk across the entire organisation
• Cyber risk quantification
• Aligning risk to business operations
• No-one can spend their way out of cyber risk
• Best-of-suite in a consolidated stack
• Best-in-class solution
• Get the board on board
• Perspectives for the near future.

The paper makes the case for a best-of-suite strategy to building cyber security infrastructure rather than the previously widely accepted best-of-breed approach. With best-of-breed, organisations were advised to buy the best security tools to defend each specific area of their IT estate such as servers, email, or endpoints. However, over time, CISOs were having to manage a multitude of tools that weren’t connected and required more specialists to manage them. The thinking behind best-of-suite is to build a coordinated system in which each component ‘talks’ to each other, and where the security team has better visibility of incidents and alerts across the entire IT ecosystem.

Quantifying cyber risk

‘Mastering Cost Management and Reduction’ focuses on the new area of Cyber Risk Quantification (CRQ), a strategic and technical method used to quantify and assess cyber risk exposure and the potential impact of cyber security incidents in a financial way. The benefits of CRQ include bringing cyber security on a par with other business risks by providing a shared framework and standard metrics, and building organisational resilience. It also informs investment decisions by measuring return on investment (ROI), enabling informed risk-taking, helping to negotiate lower cyber insurance premiums, providing competitive advantage, and facilitating timely decision-making.

Bringing the board on board

CISOs will also gain insights into some of the tried and tested methods of getting the board of directors on their side. It’s worth adopting business-focused risk language, and elevating key issues in a communicable way to executives and the board. Spending time identifying the benefits and opportunities that come with improved cyber resilience and embedding cyber security into the organisation’s thinking and behaviour can also pay dividends. Quality reporting goes a long way to showing how security has genuinely helped mitigate risks financially and operationally, and empowered the business to thrive.

In conclusion, the paper looks ahead to three key pillars of cyber security that will empower CISOs to overcome their challenges, minimise cyber risk and flourish: AI, Cybersecurity as a Service (CSaaS), and Collaborative Defence.

Download the report today

You can obtain Quorum Cyber’s whitepaper, ‘Mastering Cost Management and Reduction: A Guide for Chief Information Security Officers’ by downloading it for free today. If you would like to discuss any aspects of the paper or how Quorum Cyber can help you, please contact us at [email protected].