7 Reasons to be Thankful for Your Cybersecurity Team

Gaurav Banga
November 25, 2020 | 3 min read | Cyber Resilience

Enterprise cybersecurity teams do more than keep organizations safe. At its core, the information these folks secure is about people — customers, employees, partners. So, keeping organizations secure ultimately means securing people’s digital lives.

Cybersecurity teams are usually only acknowledged when something goes wrong. Yet for every cyber breach, there are thousands of instances where a breach is avoided due to proactive measures and security controls implemented by these teams. Infosec professionals toil hard every day to manage 4 types of risks: strategic, operational, financial, and reputational. A bad outcome in any of these areas can be bad or catastrophic for your business.

Managing Info Risk
Managing information risk

Here are 7 reasons to be thankful for your cybersecurity team, especially this year.

  1. They create and maintain information security policies that stop attackers without getting in the way of your work.
  2. They monitor the threat landscape for new kinds of bad things headed your way.
  3. They parse complex, fragmented constantly changing regulations and identify compliance risks that might cost the organization dearly if not addressed.
  4. They assist business risk owners (think everyone outside IT/security) to recognize cyber-risk and make sound decisions so that y’all can be effective as a first line of defense against cyber-attacks.
  5. They keep an eagle eye out for cutting edge cybersecurity capabilities as they emerge, putting new tech through its paces and improving cyber-resilience.
  6. They don’t yell at you when you make a rookie cybersecurity mistake.
  7. Last and probably most important, keeping your distributed organization operational and still secure as this crazy pandemic season hit.

The infographic below explains the various tactical and strategic tasks that cybersecurity professionals are responsible for.

Cybersecurity roles
Elements of cybersecurity roles chart

As Michael Hurley, one of our colleagues said in such wonderful words:

“With a lot of well-warranted focus on our frontline heroes in healthcare, public safety, critical infrastructure and logistics, I’ll be spending this Thanksgiving grateful for the other public defenders…

Talking about our security professionals, practitioners, and leaders across the globe. They too are always on call, endlessly defending our livelihoods and focused on the greater good.

Grateful for everyone above.”

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving, everyone!