Quick tips to improve your board’s cybersecurity

Boards of directors have a legal responsibility to protect their corporations against Business Risk, in particular, safeguarding assets and shareholder value. However, sometimes if you are a CISO, it is a challenge to communicate your priorities to the board. We provide you here with some quick tips to ensure your board knows more about cybersecurity and how to act upon it.

1. Encourage your board to focus on risks, not on security. Speak the language of the board, which is the risk terminology
2. Provide context and comparison. Your board would naturally like to benchmark their performance against the industry. What is the norm? Are we doing well? How much is it reasonable to spend?
3. Develop KPIs and storytelling. Again, whatever KPIs are right for your company, make them relevant to risk.
4. Change how we think about Cyber. In the same way that sometimes you feel ill, sometimes you do get breached. It will happen, eventually, so you will need to prepare a remediation plan and move forward. You would not go without health insurance- isn’t it?
5. Change how you talk about cyber.Use simple language that board can understand and be clear on what and why and explain the risk, we couldn’t reiterate more. The board is concerned about price to earnings ratios, new product launches etc. Make sure you relate to these concepts when you put forward things like budgets requests.
6. Ensure there is a comprehensive data protection policy, and that your incident response plans are tested
7. Ensure the board is engaged in cybersecurity. This demonstrates how the board is meeting its duties
8. Put resources in place and make sure you provision for things like cyber insurance.
9. Use the news headlines as teachable moments for the board audience. ‘’It could have been us’’

Understanding cybersecurity is no small task. If you have any questions do not hesitate to contact us for a chat.