CISO Reporting: 7 Tricks for Leaving Them Speechless 

Cybersecurity Needs Its Own ‘BabelFish’

What you’ll learn:

When it comes to cybersecurity, everyone expects the CISO to have all the answers — as soon as they ask the question. Most requests for enlightenment fall into one of two buckets: concerns about emerging threats making headlines, and the need for metrics that demonstrate , value and ROI of the security program.

Answering these questions requires CISOs to ingest, extrapolate, and normalize telemetry from multiple disparate platforms, vendors, teams, tools, and ticketing systems to create, let alone explain, a cohesive picture. It can take days, weeks, even months to deliver even a partial, often inconclusive report about a particular threat and its potential impact on the organization, and in the meantime, your threat landscape—and the CEO’s attention—continues to shift.

Translating Cyberspeak into Boardspeak Takes Time

As CISOs continue to engage with the board on a regular basis, security teams need one platform everyone can use to consolidate, contextualize, and communicate security data to help drive business decisions. Like the mythical BabelFish in A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which enables anyone to “instantly understand anything said in any language,” you need a ‘cybersecurity BabelFish’ to bridge the gap between Boardspeak and Cyberspeak.

Before looking at the top seven pros of having a ‘cybersecurity BabelFish,’ let’s take a closer look at the challenges CISOs face in answering these two types of questions.

“Did you see the news?”: Fire Drills Disrupt Operations

Event-driven questions can pop up at any time and create all-hands-on-deck emergencies. The CEO sees a threat in the news and wants to know, right now, whether your company might be targeted, and how well you think you can detect and prevent the attack before it mushrooms into a full-scale breach.

These types of questions require the CISO to communicate downstream in order to collect information from SOC and SecOps teams and from dozens of disparate security tools and intelligence sources. If it looks as though your company might be targeted and exposed, the CISO needs to tell colleagues throughout the IT and security organizations what to do next. That includes detailed guidance on which tools to consult, and what to do in the event that the attack succeeds — who to engage and how to communicate with them, and how to contain the threat to avoid downtime and recovery efforts. 

If it takes weeks or months to assess and report on your risk posture against a single threat, the CEO may be worrying about the next threat before CISO reports back.

“Did we move the needle?”: Reporting Promotes Board-level Rapport

The more CISOs meet or engage with the company’s executive board, the more the company benefits. Research also shows CISOs feel a greater sense of satisfaction and better about the security budget when regularly meeting with board-level executives. And, the more a CISO can demonstrate the value of previous investments, the more likely the board will be to trust and approve recommendations for continued investment. 

Board-level reports help to track and answer key questions over time:

• Are risk scores going up or down and why? 
• How do we stack up against competitors and peers in terms of exposure and confidence in our ability to respond?
• Is spending on cybersecurity going up or down and why?
• Where and how far have new initiatives and experts with specialized skills moved the needle?

While essential, the effort taken to compile and reconcile data from various dashboards and portals devours cycles that might be better spent preparing for the future than recounting the past. Suffice to say: a new approach that could accelerate, automate, and streamline CISO reporting would make your company and security operations more effective, efficient, and economically viable.

7 Benefits of a Security BabelFish for CISO Reporting

A universal translator of cybersecurity data into results-driven business intelligence provides seven invaluable assets and attributes:

1. Clarity to Build Confidence

CEOs, partners, and customers all want to know when their data and investments a) come under attack and b) appear vulnerable to specific threats. The board also expects CISOs to gauge how well protected their company is in comparison to competitors and peers in the space. 

Can the security tools you own– the investments you convinced the board to approve in the past — effectively combat this threat and protect the organizational reputation?

How the ‘BabelFish’ achieves clarity

Confidence comes from clarity — knowing exactly where you stand at any given time. In order to gain that clarity, CISOs must view all telemetry quickly, with data fully normalized and streamlined all in one place. The single source of truth must contain context, the ability to quickly drill down to gain and automatically corroborate data about defenses, threats, and possible actions to take.

2. Reliable Data to Drive the Right Actions

With no time to waste in cybersecurity, ever, everyone on the team needs to stay focused on things that matter. Along with documenting the actions taken by the team, the single source of truth should explain why some seemingly obvious steps might not have been taken, and why.

Last but not least, the tool or platform driving security and CISO reporting should propose effective next steps and recommendations. Ideally, recommendations would be made automatically, but also be verified by expert human analysts.

3. Insight to Justify Tool / Personnel Investment

CISOs often need to tell, and sometimes convince, the board to make additional investments in security tools or expert skills. That means evaluating and proving that the coverage provided by existing tools isn’t and can never be sufficient. 

By consolidating a view from all tools against defenses, the single source of truth makes it possible to see where existing tools do generate good data and where gaps in visibility, monitoring, and response exist. Again, the platform should propose detailed strategies and new solutions to fill any gaps cost-effectively.

Reliable data helps CISOs calculate and weigh the cost of addressing a specific threat versus the likelihood of it causing problems. How many more cycles would it take to prevent, investigate, or mitigate the risk? Is it worth doing or can we keep a watchful eye and make do with existing controls? Do we need to hire more experts to help protect our organization better?

4. Automation to Attract Talent, Avoid Burnout

Automation is far from a cure-all. Even after you invest in modern AI-driven security tools, you need proven analyst expertise to apply data. People not machines must prioritize and communicate next steps to incident responders. 
Automation still plays an invaluable role, however, by helping to keep analysts from being overwhelmed by noise, alerts, and tickets. The right security platform doesn’t just offload the review,  handling and escalation of incidents, it should also be able to identify gaps and opportunities to use automation to optimize security workflows.

5. Accuracy to Accelerate Decisions  

Things change fast in cybersecurity. So success, literally, becomes a matter of time. Before relying on dashboards to decide what to do next, CISOs need to know the data is complete and has not become outdated since the time it was collected.  

Speed matters, but accuracy reigns supreme. You need data that moves as quickly as your team does.How up to date is the telemetry and threat intelligence being provided to analysts? Is it still relevant by the time they take action?

Eliminate chaos by ensuring the right people get timely and accurate information they can act upon ‘out of the box.’

6. Metrics Needed to Move the Needle  

At the end of the day, program effectiveness becomes the one metric that matters. It’s also the hardest to define and quantify. Reports should focus on and be able to convey the value of measurable outcomes. CISOs who can explain how and how much progress companies have or haven’t made will maintain the respect and confidence of the board. 

On the other hand, leaving it to stakeholders to draw their own conclusions, or to see the trends emerging out of raw data leaves the entire security program in a precarious place—even when you’re doing a great job.

At this level, reporting should set clear expectations for the future. Who will be responsible for various initiatives and when will they get done?

7. A Single Source of Truth to Assess, Act, Automate, and Align  

Like any long-term relationship, success requires open, impactful communication that helps everyone stay on the same page, and the same side. Sustaining the success of your security program requires ‘future-proofing’ both your security infrastructure and your reporting infrastructure to defenses aligned with changing goals and risks to the business.

The universal translator or single source of truth can help accelerate strategic initiatives like merging workforces and security controls during mergers and acquisitions. Combining a security BabelFish with an ‘everything everywhere all at once’ view of your environment equips security leaders to build a flexible, future-ready security framework that delivers complete visibility, timely insight, accountability and transparency from a single set of data everyone can understand and apply.

Nagomi Translates Complexity into Clarity  

Nagomi redefines how CISOs approach security program effectiveness with a command center that simplifies data. The Nagomi Proactive Defense Platform pioneers a new era of effective, relatively effortless translation of security data to maximize controls, minimize exposure, and empower teams.

The only proactive defense platform to bridge the gap between tactical execution and strategic planning, Nagomi allows everyone to work with the same unified dataset so they can collaborate, prioritize, and communicate effectively. With Nagomi, create a unified threat-centric view of your security posture to measure and enhance the efficacy of your security program. 

See What Your Data Has to Say

Interested in learning more? Request a demo today to see how Nagomi’s Proactive Defense Platform and Reporting Center translates your security data into action, alignment, and acknowledgement of its value from the top down.