As organizations leverage technology to ever greater degrees to enable customer experience, drive sales, optimize operations or bring down costs, the role of a Chief Information Security Officer or CISO, has gained in prominence. Today, CISOs are not just another senior hire to be made but a key stakeholder in a business that safeguards its sustainability and growth plans.

There have been several instances of promising technology startups whose fortunes have been adversely affected by information security breaches. Some companies have had to shut down their operations because of security lapses.

Several factors have made a CISO’s role increasingly important:

1. The growing importance of data to society and the need to secure it
2. Advances in security threats, malware and hacking technology that threaten organization ecosystems
3. Regulations and laws that mandate companies with sensitive data, especially banks and financial institutions, to significantly enhance their IT security standards
4. The need for companies to stay in compliance to attract large enterprise customers with the promise of garnering large revenue deals

There are several organizational stakeholders that depend on the expertise, knowledge and advice of their Chief Security Officer: The Board of Directors, the CEO, CFO, CTO and other managerial staff, engineering and product leaders in the case of technology product companies, PR & Communication teams in case of PR crisis management and investors. The CISO’s role is expected to interact with some or all of these stakeholders in several ways:

1. Creating a secure technology architecture and security-first organization culture
2. Handling security breaches to minimize operational risk and organizational costs
3. Being a sounding board to the senior leaders to provide a risk assessment and risk mitigation perspective on strategic initiatives and growth plans
4. Building a technology security team and people infrastructure that will enable engineering and product teams to scale efficiently

We would love to hear from you on what makes a top-notch CISO. If you have been involved with recruiting a CISO candidate or working with them, we would love to hear your experience in the comments below. To find out more about CISO and other technology roles that PSS is currently hiring for, please click here. If you are looking for help in hiring a CISO candidate, please reach out to us here.