Building a strong team key for CISOs
The more diverse your team the better argues Lynn Dohm ahead of Cyber Security Hub’s Global Summit
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From the cyber security skills shortage to the lack of women represented in the cyber industry there are a wealth personnel challenges CISOs face today.
Ahead of her participation in the Leader’s Panel: The Future of Information Security, Lynn Dhom, executive director at Women in Cybersecurity, spoke to CS Hub about how building the right team can ensure you successfully protect your organization from today’s cyber threats.
Building a team
“What I see as the biggest challenge is still building an effective team with the power of diversity, thought and that’s not just as genders, that’s also cultures, experiences and backgrounds,” Dohm said.
She explained that in order to achieve diversity within a team, organizations and CISOs should consider “out of the box hiring practices”. This remains a challenge for many because of corporate hiring policies and procedures but CISOs ought not to be afraid of speaking with HR professionals about this.
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Dohm said the use of “antiquated hiring practices” is a global issue that employers and CISOs are experiencing.
Mindful hiring is the way forward, according to Dohm, and this means practices such as recruitment through gender-neutral tools as well as understand the power of diversity within a team or organization.
Retaining skilled cyber professionals is also a major issue the industry must deal with. There are 3.5 million unfilled jobs across the globe in the cyber security sector and this is in part due to organizations failing to retain professionals within the field.
Ultimately, with a broader set of backgrounds and diversity of thought, security teams are now better equipped to overcome and solve newly discovered security problems.
Paying attention
Women in Cybersecurity is a non-profit organization that is focused on recruiting, retaining and advancing women in cyber security.
Part of building a successful team involves diversity of genders. Dohm said that currently women mark up around 20-25 percent of those in the cyber security workforce, in some countries this is down to 17 percent.
Dohm, however, said that it is not necessarily being seen on security teams within organizations, with one differentiator for those who are seeing success when hiring women is that hiring managers are “paying attention”. Those who are driving change are paying attention to who they are hiring and employing are, therefore, conscious of their actions as they go through gender-neutral resume assessment and hire outside of the box.
Lynn Dohm will be joined during the Leaders’ Panel: The Future of Information Security at CS Hub’s Global Summit by Kelley Kiernan, CTO – small business innovation research program, US Department of the Air Force; James Johnson, CISO at John Deere; Muhittin Hasancioglu, cyber security advisor and former CISO at Petronas; and Edward Yakabovicz - Senior Fellow at Northrop Grumman..
