'Digital-first' economy creates new risks for CISOs

Today’s digital-first economy has transformed the role of the modern CISO, increasing threats and changing security priorities. New research from Salt Security shows that 89 percent of CISOs report that the rapid deployment of digital services has generated unforeseen risks to securing critical business data.

The study of 300 CSOs and CISOs around the world reveals the top risk as being personal liability and litigation resulting from security breaches, with 48 percent of CISOs citing that challenge.

In addition 94 percent of CISOs worldwide say the speed of AI adoption is the dynamic having the greatest impact on their role.

APIs stand out as being a key focus area. 77 percent acknowledge that APIs are already a higher priority today compared to two years ago. While 95 percent of CISOs plan to prioritize API security over the next two years, a 12 percent increase compared with that priority two years ago.

"The findings from this worldwide survey clearly show that CISOs face more pressures than ever before as a result of the acceleration of the digital economy over the past two years," says Roey Eliyahu, CEO and co-founder of Salt Security. "APIs are the building blocks of every digital service and a significant amount of risk has shifted towards them. These findings reinforce that organizations must prioritize assessing their API security strategy to ensure they are solving today's risk and not yesterday's risk."

CISOs cite a number of key security challenges, these include a lack of qualified cybersecurity talent to address new needs (40 percent), inadequate adoption of software (36 percent), complexity of distributed technology environments (35 percent) and increased compliance and regulatory requirements (35 percent).

Also significant is that while most CISOs (44 percent) report security budgets are about 25 percent higher than two years ago, nearly 30 percent identify 'lack of budget to address new security challenges' from digital transformation as a key challenge, and 34 percent of CISOs cite difficulty justifying the cost of security investments as a challenge.

On a positive note, 96 percent of CISOs worldwide report that their boards of directors are knowledgeable or very knowledgeable about cybersecurity issues. In addition, the survey shows that 26 percent of CISOs present to the board on cyber risk mitigation and business exposure once a quarter or more, and 57 percent present to the board at least once every six months.

The full report is available from the Salt site.

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