Dashboards select key metrics and force companies to standardize the measurement of those metrics across departments and business units. Additionally, they make more transparent if metrics at different organizational levels do not fit each other so that companies can easier recognize that employees at different organizational levels follow different goals. Doing so, marketing dashboards should assist within and across three major firm processes: understanding its market, planning and performance assessment.
Measuring and reporting on cybersecurity to the strategic level is not an easy task. Most existing security metrics focus on operational and technical aspects, while executives are demanding high-level, meaningful business-related information. In addition, the delegation of cybersecurity activities to local/regional security officers often results in non-standardized reporting, hindering, in turn, decision-making processes. The result may look simply but to deliver and successfully embed a reliable Cyber Security Dashboard requires skills and experience in many diverse areas, during each of the development phases. A strategic approach to the definition of a Cyber Security Dashboard helps to steer on key focus areas, create situational awareness, standardize reporting practices, align cybersecurity with the business and improve the control over cybersecurity activities. The CIO-CMO relationship is vital in today’s technology-driven marketplace because a great deal of digital innovation is around customer engagement, the domain of the CMO. Yet, the CIO must be involved in strategic planning, architecture, vendor interaction and execution of customer initiatives to integrate information, business processes and systems. The bottom line is that the two need to join forces to reach the always-on state those customers, employees, and business partners demand. But, shifts in the dissemination of technology dollars are prompting perpetual turf battles. Technology budgets today are no longer solely the domain of the CIO. In many cases, the CMO controls the purse strings, as only about half (53%) of IT spending is accounted for in the CIO’s budget. And one-fifth (20%) of companies said that 20% or more of the company’s overall technology spending occurred in the marketing department. (Curran. C 2014).
The battle over budgets is leaving a bitter taste in the mouths of CIOs and it’s giving CMOs a false sense of control. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter who does the shopping. Both the CMO and the CIO need to be involved in strategy, innovation, integration and execution.
Aligning security management to business performance CPM is a global cross-standard application, created with all the advantages of a multi-tiered approach, offering a rigorous cycle of risk identification and management. It provides the organization with a practical future-focused outlook to help you anticipate new challenges from emerging technologies and business trends. CPM ties security management to business performance through better alignment to your strategic objectives by helping organizations to:
Identify the real risks
Protect what matters most
Sustain an enterprise program
Optimize for business performance
Increase readiness, scalability and flexibility Cyber Security Assessments are of special interest to the C-suite and audit committees of companies that: are unsure of their current risk exposure; are growing their cybersecurity team and are interested from a fresh perspective on how their current capabilities compare to others in their peer group and are interested in investing in cybersecurity but are in need of project and spend prioritization. It can also provide invaluable insights to organizations that have recently experienced a public or private breach resulting in data loss, reputation damage and brand impairment.
Modern cyber resilience is based on threat intelligence. The better and organization understands its threat environment, the better it can prepare and respond to it. Threats in the cyber landscape include nations, activists, organized crime, the competition and the organization’s insiders, amongst others. By gathering and analyzing data from internal and external sources, and identifying their implications in your own environment, it is possible to obtain an overview of a general threat level that can be used as a point of reference
The relevant dashboard must focus on developing a measures and metrics program that serves core business objectives, supports proactive risk management and enables real assessment of the effectiveness and value of security programs and processes.