Bringing it all together for our customers

Speaking from this year’s RSA Conference, Forcepoint CRO Kevin Isaac shared his thoughts on specific challenges he’s learning about from the CISOs he meets with every day around the globe. In the first video he describes how CISOs are being asked more often to provide updates to the board, and to do so more frequently. In the second video he describes the key challenges CISOs face around managing budgets while wrangling a complex infrastructure as they move to the Cloud. Transcripts of both videos are included below.

Talking to the Board

It’s really interesting. At the moment I’m spending a lot of time on what CISOs and boards of directors are looking for. I find it quite interesting that a lot of CISOs I’m talking to are finding that their boards are asking for much more regular updates. From the annual update it’s now moving to quarterly updates. They’re looking for specific measures and the ability to track outcomes about how sec is improving and how sec can be measured. Can risk actually be measured? This is a big question for CISOs at the moment because boards are wrestling with this.

Interestingly, Forcepoint is doing a lot of work around our platform and around how we can integrate digital transformation, and I think there’s a really big opportunity here for us to explore this and work with CISOs around the world to help them get to the point where they can confidently talk to their boards.

The CISO’s Challenges

Every customer’s different. I can tell you that many of the CISOs are telling me that their budgets are under huge pressure. They’ve got this challenge where they’re moving to digital transformation or they’re in that process. There is the complete change of the topology of the network, as the branch network moves to a much more cloud-based infrastructure, and they’re under pressure to drive risk. I’ve heard a number of CISOs tell me that they’re moving from annual to quarterly reviews with the board. They’re being asked to score their risk, they’re being asked to make sure that they report a set of fundamental metrics at every board meeting, whilst reducing their budgets, while going through digital transformation.

And so hopefully we’ll be able to bring all of this together for our customers using a common platform which theoretically will be able to reduce costs and improve security posture whilst achieving the digital transformation objectives that customers have.