Cybersecurity is a boardroom issue, but meaningful dialogue often breaks down at the table. Boards ask about cybersecurity investments and cyber resilience; they need answers rooted in reality, not prognostication. When cybersecurity leaders respond with a list of technologies deployed and potential risks that require additional investment, board members may get frustrated by a lack of clear answers and lose trust. This is a great opportunity for CISOs to take a different approach.
Part of the challenge is that most boards don’t have cybersecurity practitioners and expertise, making it challenging to understand the linkage between technical risks and business impact. It’s the responsibility of the CISO to translate technical cybersecurity outcomes into business terms that enable board members to make well-informed decisions on future investments and financial protection for the business. Additionally, senior leadership teams need to be prepared to discuss concepts like risk appetite and potential degrees of business interruption. That’s because no amount of cybersecurity investment can guarantee zero disruptions; a certain amount of risk must be accepted.
Unfortunately, this unintentional communication gap comes with the nature of cyber threats. The board wants to know how well-positioned the company is to avoid costly business interruptions, regulatory penalties or class action lawsuits from cyber incidents. It’s tempting to rely on internal audits and regulatory compliance (such as SOC2 attestations), but these don’t provide a robust answer to cyber resilience: many companies have failed to stop cyberattacks despite extensive investments in cybersecurity tools and compliance. (In fact, Gartner predicts worldwide end-user spending on information security will reach $240 billion in 2026)
Cybersecurity leaders desperately need to prove the performance of cybersecurity investments and demonstrate confidently and with evidence that safeguards are working as intended all the time. There’s an obvious opportunity to change the conversation with boards and senior leadership teams.
Why trust fails: The limits of compliance and communication
Cybersecurity frameworks like NIST and CSF — and complying with these frameworks — are key. However, while they were designed to standardize and validate an acceptable level of controls, they don’t guarantee positive cybersecurity outcomes. Passing an audit once a year doesn’t mean your controls work every day. For instance, a misconfigured control can create direct breach exposure. A backup gap might break your recovery time objective (RTO) promise. A missing insurance requirement at the time of an attack could void coverage.
It’s tempting for CISOs to present heatmaps and dashboards that are too technical for board members. When executives ask why something is red, the conversation may wander into what seems to the board like subjectivity. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) cybersecurity disclosure requirements have forced boards to engage. New rules have increased visibility and consequences for both boards and CISOs without necessarily improving fluency. CISOs are accountable but still lack the means to prove the outcome of their team’s work. Bridging the language gap between cybersecurity leaders and business requires translation, but it’s also an opportunity to redefine the role of cybersecurity and focus on the desired outcome sought after by business leaders: cyber resilience.
Building a common language to get to “Here’s the proof of cyber resilience”
CISOs can reframe the discussion using data and evidence. Modern cybersecurity tools produce a large volume of data and information on how they operate at any point in time, the status of controls deployed, the validation of configuration and more. There’s an opportunity to collect such data, sanitize it and derive continuous insights that validate, at any point in time, not just compliance with cybersecurity regulations but also overall cybersecurity posture. Because these insights are proof of actual state, the CISO can illuminate gaps in protection on an ongoing basis and either address these gaps or help the business determine mitigation priorities. And in some cases, a perfectly appropriate business decision is to accept a risk. It’s important to capture that acceptance formally, document why it was accepted and ensure that the acceptance is reviewed on an appropriate cadence so the level of risk over time doesn’t outpace a company’s appetite.
This will remove subjectivity and confusion from board reports. CISOs can show proof of readiness and effectiveness, and boards can interpret results in familiar business terms.
Practical steps for CISOs to prove resilience
Cybersecurity deployment is critical, but insufficient. Every day, even organizations with robust cybersecurity investments fall victim to cyber attacks. Board and business leaders put the burden on cybersecurity leaders, but actually demand more: they want cyber resilience.
Cyber resilience is the ability to continue critical operations under degraded circumstances, like a cyber incident, and the agility to return to normal operations quickly and with minimal financial impact. It’s more than the deployment of cybersecurity tools. Backups must be recoverable, and cyber insurance policies need to pay claims. Ideally, the organization knows how long it takes to restart systems from backup and has all information at hand for claims to be paid fully and quickly.
Today, no single role owns cyber resilience, but different aspects are the purview of the CISO (safeguards), the CIO (backups) and the CFO (insurance). Collaboration between all three is required to assess that all safeguards are in place. It’s also time to upgrade manual tracking of safeguards to evidence-based, automated tracking.
The next step is to shift from activity reporting to evidence sharing and decision support. This includes providing a clear view of the state of cybersecurity, which then surfaces risks that the business needs to make decisions on in terms of whether to mitigate or accept. To use evidence to demonstrate whether the business is meeting its goals for cyber resilience, data must replace prediction. Next, automate low-value work. Free teams from repetitive audit preparation by using tools to aggregate and provide tamper-proof evidence. Focus human expertise on strategy and decision-making for cyber resilience instead of administrative tasks.
Finally, educate and contextualize for the board. Deliver short, outcome-focused updates that tie cybersecurity performance to cyber resilience goals. Reinforce the point that business risk and continuity ultimately reside with the board, not the CISO.
Better language, stronger trust
Cyber resilience is a business problem, not an IT and cybersecurity problem. The board will understand it when evidence-driven communication fosters transparency, trust and clarity of action. As they hear information relayed in language they can understand, boards gain confidence in investments and governance decisions. This results in fewer redlines on board reports, more meaningful conversations and longer CISO tenures. It moves cybersecurity from a reactive cost center to a proactive value driver. When CISOs can show proof tailored to the company’s own risk tolerance, the conversation changes from uncertainty to clarity.
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