2023 was the 20th anniversary of cybersecurity awareness month, and when compared to other industries, cybersecurity is still young. Unfortunately, it has garnered a reputation as the neighborhood curmudgeon shouting “Get off my lawn” from a darkened window to passersby who stray a bit too far from the sidewalk. It’s an industry rife with buzzwords, gadgetry, and tools, all making promises that are too good to be true. There are cybersecurity degrees, certifications, conferences, events, compliance requirements, and a thousand checklists. All of which create a cacophony of noise that leaders must try and filter to find the buried melody. A good cybersecurity program requires the entire organization to embrace it as part of their culture, each playing their part to achieve a common goal.
Four Essential Roles on a Cybersecurity Team
Effective cybersecurity requires leaders at every level to do exactly that – lead. From the executive leadership down to departmental and team level, leadership must share, communicate, support, and enforce a cohesive cybersecurity and information technology strategy.
Every organization needs a cybersecurity champion, a leader in the company that can develop a measurable cybersecurity strategy that balances security with operational needs and risk tolerance. This role effectively communicates that strategy both up and down the chain. This person maintains great relationships with all staff, is well versed in the technologies that support your organization, is an educator and encourager.
Your staff is simultaneously your front and last line of defense. They are likely to be the ones who first report some type of anomaly. Today’s workforce relies on, and uses, truly amazing and complex technologies that we easily take for granted. Leadership’s responsibility is to ensure that they are equipped, enabled, and educated to be effective at performing their job duties and as an integral component in monitoring and reporting potential security incidents. Encourage them to engage with your IT and security teams and vice versa. Praise and reward those who do so and encourage your IT and security teams to do the same – thank them for reporting that spam email and tell them the positive impact that has for overall security.
Under the leadership of your Security Champion, and in cooperation with your security team, your IT team is the true engine of your cybersecurity program. It isn’t all the tools that make you secure – those have their place, but the deliberate and quality engineering, configuration management and ongoing maintenance from your IT teams that create the foundation for a good program. Configuration standards, access control policies, data and network segmentation, patching, naming conventions, documentation, inventory, etc. – all these things, and more, create the baseline that allows your security teams to work from.
Cybersecurity teams are the eyes and ears of your environment, and to be effective, they rely on the baseline that IT Teams establish to differentiate between what is and is not normal. This allows them to quickly act using the tools you’ve provided them to protect the environment. Security is the audit function for IT, spotting and reporting on unpatched systems, misconfigured systems, old software, unsafe network communications, etc. This relationship can and should be cooperative (ahem… leaders). Security teams are your educators on all things cybersecurity – put them on project teams, do lunch & learns, have them present findings and incidents to your staff. This is the team that demonstrates the why behind security.
In every organization, we all need each other to be successful, especially when working to establish an effective cybersecurity program – a program that must fend off everything from low level spammers and website defacers to nation-state targeted attacks. Organizations need all the different groups to function as a single cybersecurity unit. To achieve that, your teams must be accustomed to working and training together, building trusted relationships along the way. As a cohesive entity, you will build a program that can be effective now and adapt to the challenges ahead.
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