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CIOs examine evolving cybersecurity imperatives

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Wednesday, 10 November 2021 20:38

November 10, 2021 – Organizations accelerated digitization efforts and implemented hybrid work environments to adjust to rapidly evolving employee and customer expectations. Unfortunately, these shifts added complexity and exposed vulnerabilities, which bad actors exploited with increasingly sophisticated attacks.

To protect themselves from breaches, enterprises now need to find the right threat signals in a sea of data. As a result, CIOs must enhance their organization's security capabilities by making operations effective at detecting and remediating attacks.

Companies entrust their CIOs to protect their data and technology assets from cyber threats. Unfortunately, the speed at which these threats change and the complexity required to mitigate risks pose significant challenges for resource-constrained IT departments and their security providers.

With these principles in mind, on November 3, 2021, The IT Media Group brought together 14 cross-industry IT executives for a virtual roundtable entitled 'The CIO's Evolving Cybersecurity Imperatives.' The session provided an opportunity to discuss the challenges and approaches CIOs implement in a rapidly changing world.

Moderating the roundtable was Jeff Ishii, Chief Technologist at The IT Media Group. Also participating were executives from the session sponsor, ActZero, Chief Operating Officer Chris Finan, and Head, Mid-Market Daniel West.

The interactive session included a combination of live polling and panel discussion about the challenges and best practices for the following topic areas:

1. Protecting the extended enterprise

• Security challenges of hybrid work
• Tactics to secure the expanded environment

2. Addressing the rise of ransomware

• Real impacts of ransomware
• The ransomware defence roadmap

3. Mitigating the human factor

• Exploiting human psychology
• Limiting employee impacts

4. Improving security effectiveness

• Merging data science with cybersecurity
• Cybersecurity roadmap essentials

Following the session, Chris Finan stated, "It was incredibly valuable to sit with like-minded executives and hear from real practitioners about the challenges that their businesses are facing. What stood out was how similar the challenges that each leader was encountering regardless of industry." Finan emphasized the importance of having the right expertise, staffing teams effectively, and ensuring that the C-suite and board understand the challenges. He added, "We pride ourselves on being a partner to our clients. We focus on their business drivers to ensure we deliver material outcomes as an extension to their teams. We want to bring our expertise in AI-enabled cybersecurity protection to deliver outcomes at machine speed across cloud, network, and endpoints."

Dan West remarked, "It was helpful to hear IT leaders reframe their security from being an IT problem to an enterprise problem." In discussions with companies across North America, he indicated a common problem is efficiently managing high volumes of complex data across a growing attack surface. To solve that problem, West describes ActZero's approach: "We start with best of breed vendors. We tune their out-of-the-box capabilities and then improve further with our data science expertise. Our goal is to increase security maturity, achieve higher signal to noise, and provide faster detection and response."

All participants will receive a strategic insights report containing more than 80 tactics and best practices discussed during the roundtable.

For more on how The IT Media Group fosters collaboration amongst the CIO community, please visit our events page. Interested parties can subscribe to our Youtube channel to watch a host of CIO roundtable highlights and executive interviews covering leadership, technology, and operations topics that address compelling issues.

The IT Media Group is an award-winning producer of events and content for senior IT executives. Based in Toronto, our leadership team includes some of the most experienced and well-respected media, technology, and business professionals serving Canada's IT executive community.