Tony Asher, a virtual CISO, outlines four key benefits of hiring a virtual CISO. First, they can significantly advance a company’s cybersecurity program by leveraging their expertise to overcome challenges and achieve maturity faster. Second, virtual CISOs offer industry insights, providing clients with knowledge of best practices from their extensive experience across various sectors. Third, they help build an early cybersecurity culture, ensuring that all employees understand and adhere to security protocols, which is crucial for long-term protection. Lastly, hiring a virtual CISO can save a company money compared to employing a full-time CISO, as they offer specialized knowledge and efficient processes at a lower cost.
Action Items
- Consider the benefits of hiring a virtual CISO discussed.
- Reach out to Tony Asher, at Asher Security if any listeners disagree with the points made or have additional ideas to discuss.
What are the benefits of hiring a virtual CISO?
Today I’m going to give you four benefits of hiring a virtual CISO. My name is Tony Asher. I run a cybersecurity consultant company called Asher security. I’m a virtual CISO, and I’m going to give you a little bit of insight the four benefits of hiring a virtual CISO.
#1. Certified Expert Review
Number one, they are a catalyst to your cybersecurity program, you’re essentially asking an expert, a certified expert with experience, to come in and jumpstart your program and to get it to the next level. These people, these types of expertise, people that have this kind of expertise can do it quickly and efficiently, and they’ve been there, and they know how to get over a lot of the traditional challenges and hurdles that prevent a cybersecurity maturity from reaching those milestones quicker.
#2. Industry Insight
Number two, Industry Insight, and this is really an area where a virtual CISO can provide a lot of expertise for me. I’m a virtual CISO in biotech, finance, life science and pharmaceutical so when my clients hire me to be a virtual CISO, not only are they getting 20 years of cybersecurity experience in a field that’s very wide and deep, but they’re also getting access to all my other clients and my whole network of colleagues and friends I’ve built within those industries. Why is that important? Well, the number one question I get when I’m presenting to executives, whether it be an audit committee or an executive presentation, is, what are other people like us doing? And when you have a virtual CISO that can answer that question, because they have visibility into the rest of the industry, or companies like you or your size, it really provides a confidence and a peace of mind that what you’re doing are the right things, and you want to align those with the right things for this phase of your program, your company, the size and other things too. But having someone with industry expertise is great leverage to have.
3. Cybersecurity Culture
Number three benefit of hiring a virtual CISO is building an early cybersecurity culture. And what do I mean by that? Cybersecurity is everyone’s responsibility, and whether you have a CISO an information security officer, or anyone else in that role, it’s still everybody’s responsibility. A virtual CISO can help permeate that program, make sure that users understand that and they understand what classified data is, how to transfer and store, maybe how to treat their laptop.
- What websites can they visit?
- How can they use work resources outside of work?
- What are the security threats that they should be ready to identify and respond to?
And the quicker you can build that into your company, it is going to exponentially, save you pain, time and ultimately, money. The hardest thing to change is people, and I’m guilty of this too. The easiest thing is technology. It’s really easy when I have a technology problem to go out and work with one of my VARs to sign it and to order it and to pay for it, I install it and I can configure it very quickly. But when we have to change people in technology, people in the culture of a company, it can be very slow and tedious, and we always have people resisting that change. So, the earlier you can create a culture of cybersecurity, the better it is for your company, and a virtual CISO allows you to do that without waiting until your company gets to that size of over 1000 or 2000 employees before you bring that resource in.
#4 Cost Savings
And number four can be a debatable one. I’ll let you decide, but it’s price, it’s savings. A virtual CISO can save your company a lot of money, because, you know, initially, if you hire virtual CISO, you might look at that hourly rate, or maybe it’s a monthly retainer, like what I do with my customers. And it might seem kind of expensive, but when you compare it to hiring a full time CISO or security officer, and then you also compile on that, that you’re getting a whole industry knowledge, that you’re getting a template and a proven process, and that you’re going to be able to do those things potentially a lot faster. There is a lot of savings to be had by bringing an expert in to this area of your business. So those are four benefits of hiring a virtual CISO, and I hope they help. If you disagree with any of them, or you have some other ideas, put them in the comments down below. I’d love to hear them do.
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