How Do You Take Cybersecurity Off The Back-Burner?

Following the news about the Institute of Directors on cybersecurity, Greg Day urges UK executives and IT teams to bridge the gap between them and finally take cybersecurity off the back-burner. Greg Day, VP and Chief Security Officer EMEA at Palo Alto Networks commented below.

Greg Day, VP and Chief Security Officer EMEA at Palo Alto Networks:

How do you take cybersecurity off the back-burner?

“This research from the IoD sheds light on the need for UK executives and IT teams to find common ground and finally take cybersecurity off the back-burner. Cybersecurity has to be seen as a shared responsibility, and we should all recognise the commercial implications of cyber incidents.

One of the challenges in improving cybersecurity is the lack of communication between management and their IT teams. We recently surveyed over 1,000 IT professionals of European businesses and found that businesses’ ability to take action on cybersecurity could be affected by internal misunderstanding between senior managers on IT security strategy.

There is a natural gap between business and cybersecurity leadership that needs bridging. We found that half of IT security professionals (51 percent) find it difficult to highlight possible security system weaknesses to senior management, while the rest (49 percent) find it more difficult to admit something has gone wrong and that a breach has occurred.

There are simple ways for companies to bridge this gap – and putting a focus on education means that cybersecurity insights can be consolidated into regular, digestible updates that provide business leaders with grounded, real-world information they can act on. It’s equally important for those leaders to find common ground by clearly quantifying the business value that such ideas would bring. Joining in regular cybersecurity ‘fire drills’ can also help organisations prepare for a real cyber incident.”