Raj Badhwar - The CISO’s Transformation: Security Leadership in a High Threat Landscape

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Cybersecurity has become a very prominent and mainstream topic due to audacity, frequency and ease of the attacks & severe disruption, financial and reputational impact caused by them. This is an issue which impacts the society and ecosystem, be it nation state, public & private corporations, or individuals. The Academia, Governments, Regulators, Law & Enforcements, Software/Hardware and Security Services vendors, Ethical hackers, Industry Forums etc. are all trying to do their best to help control, manage and reduce the risks. This has led to a meteorically rise of the role of the Cybersecurity practitioners within the organizations, who find themselves playing a key role in driving this mandate, working across the stakeholders. The Chief Information Security Officers role has therefore emerged as the main orchestrator expected to lead the way in securing and safeguarding our digital world.

The Cybersecurity industry is very new and faces plethora of challenges such as widening gap between digital innovations and security controls, ever increasing and complex digital threat landscape due to rise and adoption of cloud, AI, IOT, 5G etc., the rise of the threat adversaries and severe shortage of Cybersecurity talent in the industry. The CISO role has evolved to a level which requires a well-rounded skill to ensure success. The CISOs are expected to have executive presence to engage and assure the Board, influencing skills to drive the change across the organization to build a security culture, execution skills to ensure smooth and timely delivery of various organization wide projects, leadership skills to lead large teams of technical architects and security operations to ensure they are all aligned and working for a common goal, business skills to engage and empathize with the business leaders to help secure their business and marketing skills to ensure their vision, mission, values and outcomes are projected to the externals stakeholder effectively & impactfully. This, is by no means, is an easy ask from the next generation Cyber security leaders and therefore its very important that we collaborate and share our lessons learnt and best practices across our industry and help each other from our experience and mistakes. This book by Raj is one such attempt to help share pearls of wisdom so that young Cybersecurity leaders can benefit and do not have to reinvent the wheel.

I have known Raj for many years now and his vast body of work across different organizations in the field of Cybersecurity has been exceptional. Its applaudable that he has taken time out to pen down his ideas and thoughts in form of this book which could reach to many aspiring CISOs and Cybersecurity leaders. Raj has covered a myriad of Cybersecurity topics in this book and its fascinating to see the diversity of the topics and novelty of the ideas. Raj has covered various dilemmas and challenges faced by the Cybersecurity leadership and provides some great anecdotes, approaches, and pathways to deal with them. Covering topics on different leadership dimensions and decision making for CISOs, hiring to career planning, Cybersecurity biases, common taxonomy, never allow a good crisis to go waste, impactful and engaging conversations, Cybersecurity offence strategies, CISO liability protection, WFH and many more interesting topics, Raj will take you through a very interesting ride which I promise you, will not just be engaging but also rewarding with some great practical thoughts and ideas which you can apply to overcome your challenges.

This is a book for every Cybersecurity professional and also for those who want to empathize with this problem and become a partner is solving this together. Wish you a great read.

The CISOs who are best positioned to protect their organizations from an increasing number of sophisticated threat actors, malware, third-party attacks (like SolarWinds), and insider threats, while also enabling secure product development and implementing a Shift Left paradigm, are those with both the extensive technical knowledge and expertise to understand and evaluate the latest security technologies and the vision to assert new forms of CISO leadership and influence throughout their organizations.

My previous (Springer) book, The CISOs Next Frontier: AI, Post-Quantum Cryptography and Advanced Security Paradigms