Key Takeaways

• “This is a time of extraordinarily high visibility for security issues and security leadership, and that means this is a unique opportunity to shift your position in the organization.”

• “Security and risk leaders must not only defend the enterprise, but go on the offensive to help the enterprise take advantage of a wide variety of new opportunities to help them respond to an ever-changing world of threats.”

• “The best coaches in the world are viewed as honest brokers: you’re the person that we can go to when we’re not sure what’s going on and get your advice and expertise to help take us to the next level.”

• “Go on the offensive and take control of your leadership brand. Think about three words your CEO would use to describe you today, and then how you would prefer they describe you three months from now.” 

• “Go on the offensive regarding who you work with and what you work on. Focus on partnering with business customers by being clear about their job on the team.”

• “Coach executives through these tough digital uncertainties in this time of volatility, reframe your culture, embrace your role as that cultural leader, and win together by delivering on cost, revenue and risk.”

Learn more in the Gartner press release “Gartner Identifies Three Steps for Security and Risk Leaders to Lead from an Offensive Position.”

Key Takeaways

• Component 1: Basic secure email gateway (SEG): “Your first layer of defense is a SEG, which provides protection against widespread phishing attacks if they are configured correctly and the fact that attackers reuse their phishing kits.”

• Component 2: Recipient-centric phishing detection and response: “Security awareness and phishing simulation training are done with the hopes that if a user receives an email, they will analyze that email and respond correctly.” 

• Component 3: Advanced SEG and supplements: “These solutions typically use machine learning to model normal behavior and flag anomalous behavior.”

• Component 4: SOC-centric phishing detection and response: “Many organizations have highly skilled people sitting in a security operations center (SOC) that spend a significant portion of their time looking at phishing messages.”

• Component 5: Internal control of business processes: “Whenever users receive a message, they should take one step back and think about the context.”

Key Takeaways

• Remote work is the new normal, which introduces a number of security challenges. Protecting and maintaining the remote workspace is critical through developing a limited number of remote work profiles and associated policies.

• The “cybersecurity mesh” architecture is emerging to secure distributed digital assets and extended cybersecurity controls wherever needed.

• Security product consolidation is underway as CISOs are starting to seek simplification of their environments. In fact, 80% of IT organizations plan to pursue a vendor consolidation strategy in the next 3 years, with 30% already doing this.  

• Identity-first security is now an imperative for organizations and represents the way all information workers will function, regardless of whether they are remote or office-bound.

• Machine identity management is becoming a critical security capability, too. It’s not only about securing human entities, but also machines such as workloads and devices.

• Breach and attack simulation tools are emerging to provide continuous defensive posture assessments, especially as recent security attacks make global headlines.

• Privacy enhancing computation protects critical data during processing.There  are three types of computation techniques: data transformation, secure computation and hardware-based security.

• Boards are adding cybersecurity experts to better understand risk. Boards told Gartner that the top two sources of risks to the enterprise are regulatory/compliance risk and cybersecurity.