How CISOs Can End Cybersecurity “Blame Shifting”

By Guilad Regev
Vice President of Customer Success

What You Will Learn

Understanding the challenges CISOs face with fragmented cybersecurity efforts
The impact of internal dysfunction and blame shifting on cybersecurity
How to improve cross-departmental coordination and project management
The benefits of consolidating cybersecurity management tools into a single platform

Fragmentation in Cybersecurity Management

Managing cybersecurity for a large organization is a challenge. A perfect storm of increasing attacks, budget cuts, and an overabundance of diverse security tools that don’t communicate effectively has overwhelmed the internal security structures at many organizations. Cybersecurity efforts have become fragmented across multiple departments and teams, with insufficient cross-collaboration and management.

Interdependencies between departments make cybersecurity efforts more complicated. Delays or miscommunications can disrupt progress and effectiveness, leading to gaps in the defense strategy, and chronic finger-pointing and blame shifting.

Ultimately, this internal dysfunction can cause an organization to fail in their cyber defense efforts.

A modern CISO is like a good orchestra conductor. They must synchronize the diverse talents and resources within their organization and get them to play in unison to produce a harmonious and resilient defense against cyber threats. Of course, the better the conductor and musicians, the better the orchestra.

Understanding the Dependency Challenge

In order to maintain a high-level cybersecurity posture, CISOs need to better understand the priorities, tasks, and status of all cybersecurity projects to ensure cross-departmental efforts are aligned and move forward as expected. Furthermore, the CISO, as the conductor, must proactively manage team efforts to ensure smooth coordination and prevent disruptions.

This is just the high-level challenge.

The CISO also has to face day-to-day complex management tasks as well. These include improving cross-collaboration efforts, balancing the budget, and optimizing the Cyber Defense Plan to align with effective cybersecurity risk management. The CISO must always be able to identify and prioritize which tasks are most important for reducing risk. However, it’s equally important to understand how a delay in one project may cause a ripple effect and delay another.

The State of Chaos in Cybersecurity Management

Currently, CISOs’ cybersecurity planning information is scattered across incompatible formats and disparate platforms. Budgets are typically managed in spreadsheets, project planning is conducted through project management systems, and team tasks are tracked using tools like Jira or other ticketing systems.

Each of these has its own tracking system, metrics, and dashboards. This disorganization makes it nearly impossible to see how different elements of the security operation interact and affect each other. CISOs today lack clear visibility into the complex interdependencies of their team management, project statuses, and budgets.

Managing Cybersecurity Teams Successfully

The main question for CISOs is how to manage teams effectively in such a challenging environment? How do they hold team meetings, manage their employees, and organize an effective project plan to enhance their cybersecurity?

After we discussed this issue with dozens of CISOs, a few common patterns have emerged that illustrate the need to bring order to the disarray in all stages of security management.

Here’s what CISOs tell us typically happens –

Team Meetings: Department heads report on their own progress and projects. However, issues with dependencies and cross-collaboration often arise, causing confusion and sometimes blame-shifting.
One-on-One Meetings: Department heads share plans that were made months ago, but there is often a lack of clarity on the current status, delays, costs, and the impacts on other departments and the overall budget.
Task Management: The CISO reviews the ticketing system for the department heads’ tasks, asks questions, receives answers, and may assign new tasks. This leads to task-creep and over-scheduled team members.
Post-Meeting Oversights: With no unified tool to assist the CISO, items may be forgotten. After the meeting, the CISO may realize they forgot to discuss important topics like pentest results, the overall budget, or the impact of delays in other departments.

The SAGE Platform helps CISOs and their teams make better cyber defense planning decisions, and reduces the need for “blame shifting”

The Need For Task-Driven Cybersecurity Management

In order to create order out of this chaos, CISOs need to adopt an approach of task-driven cybersecurity management to enhance team coordination, project oversight, and budget control.

It’s time for the CISO to gain a better picture of all open projects, tasks, and budgets by consolidating them all in one place. The CISO needs:

CISOs need an integrated platform that consolidates cybersecurity planning, seamlessly connecting budgeting, project management, and task tracking.
An easy-to-use system, analogous to what the sales manager gets with Salesforce, with everything accessible in one place.
Customizable dashboards and easy-to-understand reports that provide a clear view of the cyber defense plan, and the future work plan.
The ability to compare planned versus actual performance.
Insights into the business and risk impacts of major decisions such as whether to keep an outsourced SOC versus building one in-house.
A way to explain the rationale behind cybersecurity decisions to management in a language they understand.
Clarity on whether they will meet their goals, or need to take actions to improve their security posture to avoid negative consequences.

For CISOs facing these challenges, the SAGE Cyber platform offers a solution. SAGE’s Cyber Defense Planning and Optimization (CDPO) Platform consolidates all projects, tasks, and budgets into one accessible platform. With intuitive dashboards and easy-to-understand reports, CISOs can see planned versus actual performance, understand the impact of key decisions, and communicate effectively with management. With SAGE as their cybersecurity co-pilot, CISOs make informed, data-driven decisions with SAGE as cybersecurity co-pilot.

For more information, or to view a self-guided walkthrough of the SAGE platform, click here.

To learn more about how SAGE can help you with cyber defense planning, book a demo today.

Key Takeaways

CISOs need to understand and manage interdependencies between cybersecurity projects to avoid blame shifting and disruptions.
Fragmented tools and scattered information create challenges in visibility and coordination.
Effective cybersecurity management requires task-driven approaches and integrated platforms for better oversight.
Consolidating tasks, budgets, and project management into a single platform like SAGE improves efficiency and communication