Cybersecurity and the Business – Theresa Lanowitz – BSW #363
Cybersecurity resilience, different from cyber resilience, is critical as threats grow in frequency and complexity. With digital innovation driving business, cybersecurity resilience is essential for maintaining stakeholder trust and compliance. But where do you start?
Theresa Lanowitz, Chief Evangelist at LevelBlue, joins Business Security Weekly to discuss how to align cybersecurity and the business, including the need to:
- fundamentally shift you mindset and approach to acheiving operational excellence in cybersecurity
- prioritize IT and building security into everything you do
- prioritize proactive investment over funding emergencies
- leverage external expertise for success
This segment is sponsored by LevelBlue. Visit https://securityweekly.com/levelblue to learn more about them!
Theresa Lanowitz is a globally recognized cybersecurity leader, former Gartner analyst, and former Chief Cybersecurity Evangelist with AT&T Cybersecurity and LevelBlue.
She is the creator of Executive-led Growth, a strategy that emphasizes the importance of business understanding in the cybersecurity market.
With a distinguished career in the technology industry, Theresa has held influential roles at companies including Gartner, Borland, Taligent, and Sun Microsystems, significantly impacting application security and emerging technologies.
Theresa is a globally respected leader known for her deep and diverse experience in cybersecurity. She frequently speaks at major industry conferences, including RSA and Black Hat sharing her insights on market trends, AI integration, and the evolving threat landscape. She’s been published in Forbes, Dark Reading, SC Media, ISMG, InformationWeek, and more, with her contributions reflecting a deep commitment to advancing cybersecurity practices and fostering innovation within the industry.
Theresa holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA.
C-Suite & Boardroom Blind Spots While Aligning Cybersecurity Strategy with Business – BSW #363
In the leadership and communications segment, Blind Spots in the C-Suite & Boardroom, Evolving Cybersecurity: Aligning Strategy with Business Growth, How to Lead Like a Coach, and more!
Matt Alderman
- Blind Spots in the C-Suite & Boardroom
Looking back on business failures often reveals blind spots that led to lack of understanding, strategic error and missed opportunities. Protiviti’s Jim DeLoach asks: Are the executive team and board aware of the organization’s blind spots?
- Why the CFO-CISO relationship is key to mitigating cyber risk
A lack of common language and understanding between CISOs and CFOs is leaving organisations more vulnerable to cyber attacks. Bridging the communication gap between the CFO and CISO will be crucial for organisations to effectively mitigate cyber risk.
- How to ensure cybersecurity strategies align with the company’s risk tolerance
Aligning an organization’s appetite for risk with cybersecurity strategies is a critical challenge CISOs face, one that requires balancing technical controls and business needs. Achieving that balance demands a capacity to adapt to changing risk environments. But as the CrowdStrike outage showed, well-prepared systems can encounter unforeseen issues, highlighting why cybersecurity strategies need to consider the broader implications of the organization’s risk tolerance.
- Forrester’s CISO budget priorities for 2025 focus on API, supply chain security
Going into 2025, safeguarding revenue and minimizing business risks must dominate CISOs’ budgets, with investments aligned with business operations driving priorities.
Forrester’s latest budget planning guide for security and risk clarifies that securing business-critical IT assets needs to be a high priority going into next year. “The budget increases that CISOs will receive in 2025 should prioritize addressing threats and controls in application security, people and business-critical infrastructure,” writes Forrester in the report.
CISOs must double down on threats and controls to get application security rights, secure business-critical infrastructure and improve human risk management. Forrester sees software supply chain security, API security and IoT/OT threat detection as core to business operations and advises CISOs to invest in these areas.
- Evolving Cybersecurity: Aligning Strategy with Business Growth
Cybersecurity risks are continually growing. CISOs, CIOs, CEOs, and Boards are under immense pressure to manage these threats while simultaneously enabling business success. The challenge is significant, but with the right approach and insights, organizations can achieve greater security and unlock new value that is necessary for sustainability.
- How to Lead Like a Coach
The modern workplace demands that executives move away from a command-and-control style and instead adopt a model based on the idea of the leader as a coach. Companies have devoted extensive resources to this effort, in the form of time-intensive training programs and expensive new technologies, but without great success. In this article, the authors draw on their experiences as behavioral scientists and propose a simpler, cheaper, and more-effective approach: Help leaders identify interactions that they’re already having with their employees and work to transform them into coaching moments.
- The Symphony of Communication: Mastering the Art of Connection in Life and Business
In the grand tapestry of life and business, communication is the thread that weaves everything together. It’s the silent symphony that orchestrates relationships, decisions, and progress. The principles of effective communication are as timeless as they are essential, guiding us to navigate the complexities of human interaction with grace and precision. Here, I distill the most important communication principles, painfully learned through personal and professional life, hopefully ensuring that your words don’t just fill the air but resonate with purpose and get you closer to your goals.
