How are CISOs holding up in the era of AI?
According to Tim Ramsay, Managing Director of Mandiant Client Advisory (now part of Google Cloud), and our guest on Silo Busting: “You have a number of parts of the organization that may be embracing AI without any involvement from central IT, and more importantly… without security.”
Not an easy situation for a CISO.
But not to worry, Ramsay and Sam Rehman, EPAM’s CISO and SVP, have seen this kind of thing before. In the pre-AI age, there were other technology inflection points, such as virtualization and the cloud, and our conversationalists learned that dealing with them involved clear communication and trust.
Today’s CISOs “don’t want to kill the business or stop the business,” says Ramsay. “They want to enable the business. But that kind of presupposes they know what the business is trying to do.”
What’s necessary, he says, is for business leaders “to have some level of trust that the security people are actually going to bring something productive to the conversation and not just rule from a position of fear, uncertainty and doubt.”
CISOs must teach their colleagues that secure business is, as Ramsay notes, a team sport and that organizations must know their data assets. Security people must also be clear about risk. “We need to be real about what type of threats we actually are engaging,” says Ramsay.
Listen to the full podcast now.