Intelligent CISO Issue 70 | Page 41

expert

OPINION
LEON WARD , VP OF PRODUCT MANAGEMENT , THREATQUOTIENT
Security operations expert , Leon Ward , VP of Product Management , ThreatQuotient , says it ’ s time to get real about the people side of cybersecurity automation .

The CISO ’ s next priority isn ’ t technology – it ’ s building a great employee experience

In security , we are very used to

A talking about features and functions in the tools we use . When it comes to measuring the positive impact of what we spend on cyber , in terms of both people and equipment costs , we tend to be equally abstract- for years , ‘ mean time to detection ’ and ‘ mean time to resolution ’ have probably been the two most widely-used metrics for cybersecurity progress , and measuring the number of security incidents handled is still probably how the CISO tracks his team ’ s contribution to the organisation .

But no longer . Today we need to start thinking about measuring cyber ’ s impact in completely new ways – or to be more accurate , concepts new to us in IT security but already very familiar to our colleagues in HR ; with terms that seem very far from threat intelligence , such as wellbeing , inclusion and creating psychologically safe spaces .
Why ‘ EX ’ is becoming more important
In non-IT parts of the workplace , the shorthand for such approaches and employment policies comes under the umbrella term EX – employee experience , which has been defined by Gartner as the way in which employees internalise and interpret the interactions they have with their organisation , as well as the context that underlies those interactions .
What makes the extension of CISO thinking into this area even more remarkable is that it ’ s in the context of cybersecurity automation – defined as the provision of real-time detection , rapid response and proactive defence tools , so making systems that can help protect us at scale and which optimise many of the routine tasks human security practitioners get asked to do .
Security automation is still a relatively new part of the wider cybersecurity armoury , which explains why it ’ s not as big a spending priority for Chief Security and Information Officers , as other cyber tools with a 2023 market size of US $ 9bn ( though set to grow to US $ 17bn by 2028 ). However , interest is rapidly rising , as we start to see how we need to be able to operate at cloud-level scale and Machine Learning speed to cope with the evolving sophistication of security threats .
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