After the Holidays, What CISOs Really Need Is Less

The holidays are over, the decorations are coming down, and inboxes are once again filling up, this time with vendor pitches, year-end security reports, and bold promises for the year ahead. Holiday gift guides may have peaked in the weeks leading up to Christmas. However, still, for CISOs, the underlying question remains relevant well into the new year: what do you give a security leader who supposedly “has everything”? The notion of a fully resourced, perfectly staffed, and effortlessly secure organization remains a myth—and no amount of shiny new tools will change that.

For one thing, a CISO who has everything (ample cybersecurity personnel, a generous budget, a company that fully embraces a security-first culture, to name a few) is a mythical creature that doesn’t exist in the real world. And ten-buck gifts aren’t going to do much against ransomware.

But that doesn’t mean CISOs should be left out. It’s just that in a time of abundance, in terms of available security tools and add-ons, what they really need is less, not more. Addition through subtraction. They need, in a word, simplification.

In the spirit of the holidays, here are a few ways you can brighten the lives of overworked, overstressed CISOs by bringing some simplicity into a complex cybersecurity world. These tips are there for the taking – or giving, as it were. And best of all, they’ll fit within any budget.

The Thoughts That Count

CISOs are regularly bombarded with pitches for products with so many varied capabilities that they can lose sight of what’s actually mission-critical. For the CISO on your list, the best thing you can do is focus on what’s essential: the problems we are trying to solve, the real costs, and how we can simplify the solutions. 

For example, regarding your detection capabilities, focus on the meantime to detect threats and the time from detection to remediation. What’s most important is prevention. A network that’s protected with, for instance, network-layer MFA, micro-segmentation and a seamless zero trust approach (as we’ll see below), will reduce detections significantly. Password solutions can also be simplified by emphasizing that the username and password alone shouldn’t be enough to access the system.

You should also use other approaches, such as interactive sensing, to reduce reliance on passwords.

Separate the AI Wheat From the Chaff

The holiday season has no shortage of hype. Right now, the year-round hype centers on AI. It can be hard to resist, especially when executives and board members have jumped on the AI train. Instead of amplifying the hype, focus on key questions: Who will use AI and how will they use it? How much will it cost? How do we implement protections for using AI? And, importantly, how will AI make our business better or faster? Will it differentiate us from the competition? Sometimes the answer is no.

Take generative AI. It’s strong in some areas and weaker in others. Still, some organizations are trying to solve all their problems with GenAI, in the process exposing more of their data to attack and sometimes disseminating bad data and code. Instead, simplify the process, focusing on clear benefits while reducing your attack surface. And be willing to recognize where it doesn’t fit.

Port Control Keeps Vulnerabilities at Bay

Organizations can spend significant time and effort on penetration testing and patching across hundreds or thousands of servers. How can they simplify this process? One effective approach is to use multi-factor authentication (MFA) to protect privileged ports at network layer 3.

After identifying the most critical applications, teams can map vulnerabilities to the exposure windows that enable them. MFA typically works at the application level, requiring codes delivered via SMS, hardware tokens or authentication apps to confirm their identities. But by applying MFA at the network level, you can control access to network ports based on verified user credentials, implementing effective multi-factor network segmentation and reducing your attack surface.

Imagine having, say, 80% of the organization’s ports protected at the host level. With this approach, you can secure a broader range of assets, including those typically outside the scope of MFA, such as legacy systems and Internet of Things devices.

A Zero Trust Approach You Can Trust

A zero trust environment is a goal for any organization. But people tend to believe three things about zero trust: it’s tough, very complex and very expensive to implement. It requires a lot of time to deploy new agents, and it also asks customers to delve into their networks, topologies and application dependencies. Many zero trust solutions require customers to do most of the work. Faced with those prospects, a CISO might want to try almost anything else instead.

But implementing zero trust doesn’t have to be so all-consuming. Micro-segmenting the network through automated security processes, for example, enables seamless implementation of zero trust network access (ZTNA) and enforces least-privilege access policies critical to zero trust. The tools are available to automate the implementation of zero trust policies. Partnering with CISOs on zero trust rather than selling them a tool is a gift that can keep on giving.

A Simple Message

Every CISO would love to find a larger budget under their tree tied with a big red bow and a stack of blank checks. But in many cases, they could significantly improve their security posture by allocating their existing budget more effectively. As such, simplifying processes by helping them focus on straightforward solutions to your organization's most critical challenges is the best gift they could receive.