A practical approach
It was great to chat with Lieutenant General Michelle McGuinness, the National Cyber Security Coordinator, about the 2023 – 2030 Australian Cyber Security Strategy as well as key initiatives, strategic imperatives and challenges that CISOs must navigate.
Cyber security leaders have to be effective change agents to be successful. Cyber capability uplift and risk reduction initiatives often require significant transformation in the organisation. In this blog, I’ll introduce a tried and tested change management framework and demonstrate its application to cyber security in an illustrative case study.
I’m proud to be named CyberPeace Institute‘s Volunteer of the Month.
A big shoutout to CyberPeace for this awesome recognition! It’s been such a rewarding experience to help them in their mission to make the digital world safer for everyone.
The CyberPeace Institute is a non-profit focused on reducing the harm caused by cyberattacks to individuals and communities. Through their CyberPeace Builders program, they offer free cybersecurity support to organisations that need it most, especially those where cyber threats can have a serious impact.
As a volunteer, I’ve had the chance to help for-purpose organisations respond to cyber attacks, develop incident response plans, run security awareness training, perform dark web monitoring and craft essential policies and procedures. Plus, I’ve provided general cyber advice along the way. It’s been an incredible journey being part of a team that’s making a real difference.
Scenario analysis is a powerful tool to enhance strategic thinking and strategic responses. It aims to examine how our environment might play out in the future and can help organisations ask the right questions, reduce biases and prepare for the unexpected.
What are scenarios? Simply put, these are short explanatory stories with an attention- grabbing and easy-to-remember title. They define plausible futures and often based on trends and uncertainties.
NIST released a new version of the Cybersecurity Framework with a few key changes:
I often use this framework to develop and deliver information security strategy. Although, other methodologies exist, I find its layout and functions facilitate effective communication with various stakeholder groups, including the Board.
Cyber security leaders deal with complex problems all the time, but only a few are well equipped to deal with such challenges effectively. Systems thinking is a discipline that can help CISOs improve their ability to see the bigger picture and move beyond simplistic linear cause-effect relationships and point-in-time snapshots.
Systems thinking is a mindset that encourages you to see interdependencies, processes and patterns of complex systems. Complex systems contain multiple interacting feedback loops and it is this feature that make them so challenging to understand, diagnose and improve.
In this blog I outline some examples of complex systems, recommend tools to begin to understand and influence them and demonstrate how these techniques can be applied to improve digital safety and security.
Not every conversation a CISO is having with the Board should be about asking for a budget increase or FTE uplift. On the contrary, with the squeeze on security budgets, it can be an opportunity to demonstrate how you do more with less.
To demonstrate business value and achieve desired impact, a CISO’s cyber security strategy should go beyond cyber capability uplift and risk reduction and also improve cost performance.
Security leaders don’t have unlimited resources. Significant security transformation, however, can be achieved leveraging existing investment and security resource levels.
Following-up on my recent update on starting an Executive MBA, I wanted to share that I’ve reached a milestone in my learning journey; I’m half-way through with six modules completed.
I already wrote about Data Analytics and Decision Making and in this blog I’ll briefly summarise a few other courses I’ve completed and how some of the learnings can be applied to cyber security leadership.
In this 15 minute interview I spoke with Ed Kennedy of CSO Australia, reflecting on Australian cyber security incidents of 2022, leadership and my approach and insights to cyber security at Linkly.
Cyber Security Leadership 