Best Practices of CISOs

The role of the CISO is becoming more strategic within many organizations. Today's experienced CISO is required to be both a technologist and a business leader, with the ability to address board level concerns as well as manage complex technologies. To help CISOs better protect their organization and understand how their roles compare with those of other CISOs, the 2013 IBM CISO Assessment identifies practices and behaviors that can strengthen the role of information security leaders.

The study uncovers key findings, leading practices, and a set of shortcomings that even mature security leaders are wrestling with. Looking in depth at three areas - business practices, technology maturity, and measurement capabilities - a path emerges that acts as a guide for both new and experienced security leaders.

"It's evident in this study that security leaders need to focus on finding the delicate balance between developing a strong, holistic security and risk management strategy, while implementing more advanced and strategic capabilities - such as mobility and BYOD," said David Jarvis, author of the report and manager at the IBM Center for Applied Insights.

Business practices

The security leaders interviewed stress the need for strong business vision, strategy and policies, comprehensive risk management, and effective business relations to be impactful in their roles. Understanding the concerns of their C-suite is also critical. More mature security leaders meet regularly with their board and C-suite, thereby improving relations.

When they meet, the top topics that they discuss include:

Identifying and assessing risks: 59 percent

Resolving budget issues and requests: 49 percent

New technology deployments: 44 percent.

The challenge for security leaders is to successfully manage the diverse security concerns of the business.

Technology maturity

Mobile security is the number one "most recently deployed" security technology, with one-quarter of security leaders deploying it in the past 12 months. And although privacy and security in a cloud environment are still concerns, 76 percent have deployed some type of cloud security services - the most popular being data monitoring and audit, along with federated identity and access management- both at 39 percent.

While cloud and mobile continue to receive a lot of attention within many organizations, foundational technologies that CISOs are focusing on include:

Identity and access management: 51 percent

Network intrusion prevention and vulnerability scanning: 39 percent

Database security: 32 percent

The primary mobile challenge for security leaders is to advance beyond the initial steps and think less about technology and more about policy and strategy. Less than 40% of organizations have deployed specific response policies for personally owned devices or an enterprise strategy for bring-your-own-device (BYOD). However, this gap is being recognized, establishing an enterprise strategy for BYOD (39%) and an incident response policy of personally owned devices (27%) are the two top planned areas for development for the next 12 months.

Measurement capabilities

Security leaders use metrics mainly to guide budgeting and to make the case for new technology investment. In some cases, they use measurements to help develop strategic priorities for the security organization. In general, however, technical and business metrics are still focused on operational issues. For example, over 90 percent of interviewees track the number of security incidents, lost or stolen records, data or devices, and audit and compliance status - fundamental dimensions you would expect all security leaders to track. Far fewer respondents, about 12 percent, are feeding business and security measures into their enterprise risk process even though security leaders say the impact of security on overall enterprise risk is their most important success factor.