A string of high‑profile cyberattacks in recent months has made one thing clear: cyber risk is no longer a technical problem to be delegated to IT, it has become a board‑level resilience and trust issue. When household‑name brands are disrupted and public agencies are breached, customers don’t ask which endpoint agent failed – they ask whether they can still trust the organisation with their data and their money, writes Joe Hubback, Partner and CISO, Elixirr.
Yet, amid rising threat activity, business confidence remains paradoxically high. Our recent Elixirr research found that while 94 per cent of business leaders believe they are cyber-ready, 68% admit they lack real‑time resilience dashboards, signaling most leadership teams lack crucial visibility. Too many boards are still treating cyber as a siloed, technical problem rather than a systemic business risk and it’s time for a reset.
Legacy ‘IT‑only’ defences are failing businesses
Traditional security models were built for a world with clear boundaries, where corporate networks and on‑premises apps sat behind neat lines of responsibility. That world has vanished. Attackers don’t need to batter down the front gate if they can instead borrow a key from a contractor, exploit a misconfigured cloud entitlement, or ride a trusted integration into a critical workflow. In this reality, dependencies are the attack surface.
The challenge is partly structural. Many of the controls that matter most sit outside classical IT. Procurement negotiates supplier access, operations teams design manual workarounds, HR defines joiner‑mover‑leaver processes, and product teams connect new partners at speed. If those decisions aren’t shaped by clear security guardrails, a technically robust environment can still be fragile in practice. At the same time, the shift to ‘as‑a‑service’ creates blind spots. Logs and controls may live with vendors, service boundaries blur, and an incident in a provider’s environment can quickly affect a business’ own customer experience.
Breaches happen but the decisive questions are how quickly suspicious behaviour is detected, how far an adversary can move, and how safely businesses can recover without compounding harm. That requires service‑level thinking, understanding which customer‑facing capabilities are truly crown jewels, what they depend on (including people and suppliers), and how to limit blast radius when, not if, pressure arrives.
Leadership decisions
Boards typically receive rich, near‑real‑time views of revenue, costs, and operations. Cyber on the other hand, is an afterthought for many boards, often showing up as an after‑the‑fact compliance checklist, sharing compliance ticks, projects delivered, and periodic test results – useful, but inadequate for steering the enterprise through fast‑moving risk. Leaders cannot successfully govern what they don’t prioritise and without timely, business‑relevant visibility, crisis decisions become guesswork.
Signals tied to outcomes
Real-time insights means signals tied to the outcomes the board cares about most. An effective resilience view starts with a short list of critical services and tracks their readiness to withstand and recover from disruption. Executives should be able to see, at a glance, whether backups for those services are immutable and recently tested, whether failover paths actually work, and whether recovery time objectives are realistic in practice. Identity health deserves similar prominence, including multi‑factor enforcement for privileged roles, reduction of standing admin rights, and device trust on sensitive access. The presence of risky dormant accounts say more about breach likelihood than generic maturity scores
Against this backdrop, the CISO’s role is shifting from technical custodian to enterprise risk leader. As the function integrates with finance, operations, HR, procurement, product, and communications, the CISO becomes more visible to investors and the board. They do not need a seat on the board, but they do need reliable access and a clear escalation pathway to surface material issues and trade‑offs in business terms. In transparent, well‑structured organisations, the CISO can calibrate risk appetite, align spend, and bring decision‑ready metrics. However, in more rigid and conservative structures, CISOs are facing increasing hurdles.
Catalyst for enterprise‑wide resilience
The CISO is its chief architect inside the enterprise, turning resilience from a technical aspiration into a measurable business capability. Their job is to translate cyber risk into operational and financial terms, set clear standards for predictable performance under stress, and show credible evidence of progress.
Working with the CEO, the CISO positions resilience as a strategic capability and sets the cadence for board‑level discussions grounded in outcomes, not tools. In partnership with the CFO, they align risk appetite to insured and self‑insured loss thresholds, map spend to the most material scenarios, and ensure financial playbooks support rapid, orderly recovery. Alongside the COO, the CISO owns continuity for the services customers actually experience, bringing technology, people, suppliers, and process failovers into one tested plan with realistic recovery objectives.
Making this real requires shared rituals the CISO leads. Cross‑functional tabletop exercises, centred on customer journeys and supplier dependencies, build muscle memory and expose friction long before an incident. Executive dashboards, reviewed with the same cadence as financial KPIs, keep resilience on the agenda and turn improvements into visible wins.
The payoff is confidence anchored in evidence. When the CISO is empowered to integrate across functions, measure in business outcomes, and rehearse in the open, leadership starts governing by design. Customers notice, regulators notice, and when pressure arrives, the organisation responds with coherence rather than scramble, protecting both operations and reputation.
