The end of the quarter is fast approaching and it’s time to put together your slide deck for the board meeting. Before you begin creating bulleted slides for all the projects your team is working on, take a moment to zoom out. What do your board of directors and C-suite colleagues really want to know?
Most executive leaders have 3 main questions about cybersecurity:
- Where are we?
- Where do we want to be?
- How will we get there?
Answering these questions succinctly is no easy feat, so using a concise and simple narrative to guide your presentation is important. Your goal with this presentation is to help the Board meet its fiduciary duties. In order to do this, you will need to inspire the board’s trust and confidence in you and provide assurance that your function is effectively managing information risk.
4 Key Sections In Your Board Presentations
There are 4 key parts to your board presentation:
1. Summarize the last meeting and refresh your Board about your cybersecurity framework
Summarize the takeaways from the previous Board presentation. Follow-up on unresolved issues or any unanswered questions from the previous meeting. Refresh the Board on your security framework.
2. Present your risk dashboard and review events and changes in risk landscape
Update the Board on the overall risk landscape for your organization, including and notable events. Highlight risks that require immediate action. Present mitigation strategies and explain how the Board can help.
3. Review progress against your strategic Infosec roadmap
Present Infosec’s progress towards your strategic objectives that you presented earlier to the Board. Be Transparent about any setbacks and say how you are managing through these.
4. Review any special topic
Discuss any topics that fall outside the scope of the other agenda topics. For example, relevant topics include M&A activity, a data breach, etc.
You can download a powerpoint template that will help you organize your presentation to the board of directors. If you are a new CISO and presenting to your board for the first time, you should use a variation of this template which can be downloaded here.
“Automating” your board-level presentations
Sorry, can’t be done.
But we can help automate many of the KPIs you would like to report on. Balbix uses specialized AI to identify and prioritize your unseen vulnerabilities across 100+ attack vectors and help you mitigate these risk items. Balbix calculates risk, likelihood, and impact scores for every area of your business and provides intuitive visualizations for your presentations to the board and C-suite colleagues. You can get risk trends and to understand how you’re progressing on cyber risk and determine a clear action plan for improving your cybersecurity posture. With Balbix, the board presentation that would’ve taken weeks to complete can be completed in minutes.
Request a demo to learn more.
