Four Resolutions for Security Leaders to Keep in Mind for 2023

Starting off a new year often comes with a re-energized sense of taking stock of big changes you want to make and how you want to accomplish them. And, as we come off of “prediction season”, there’s also a sense of the hot topics and challenges that are already on the horizon for the security community. While seemingly everybody makes security predictions, here’s how you can make those predictions a reality with resolutions for the coming year, featuring helpful commentary from some of our experts here at Netskope:

Create unified security, infrastructure, and operations teams to better ensure successful digital transformation

It is becoming increasingly clear that to succeed in today’s hybrid workforce, organizations must find a way to balance and unify the needs of security and networking teams. As Jason Clark, Chief Security and Strategy Officer, noted in a blog from 2022, “Networking teams don’t want to sacrifice network performance and user experience, while security teams don’t want to sacrifice visibility and protection.” Jason then digs into how a modern architecture, one that uses a converged secure access service edge architecture, “one that provides a single point of inspection for traffic that enables a sustainable, fast, secure, and cost-effective hybrid work experience,” is key to unifying the needs of both networking and security teams. as they tackle digital transformation in the year to come.

Establish more effective technologies and processes to reduce the technical and economic burden of staying secure

Staying secure as an organization requires constant upkeep and re-evaluation, especially with uncertain economic conditions on the horizon. In a recent two-part series of articles for Forbes, Field CTO Steve Riley broke down key strategies for evaluating the effectiveness of processes and technologies to better enable people and maximize the impact of their security resources. “Ultimately, improving the effectiveness of your processes and technologies can help increase the value of your people as well,” Steve says.

Communicate your security program’s business value year-round

Often, security leaders are communicating the value of their program to their board when budget time rolls around to make sure their projects are funded for the upcoming year. In a recent article for HelpNet Security, covering the core elements needed for security business case, James Christiansen, VP and CSO Cloud Strategy, noted that security and technology leaders should be communicating how their program is helping enable business goals, such as enabling agility, controlling costs, and managing risks. “Security and network leaders should also be presenting regular status updates to report on current progress, educating their management team, and setting advanced resource expectations for future budget cycles,” Christiansen says.

Prioritize mental health for security teams and leaders

It’s no secret that security is a very stressful and high turnover industry with major potential for burnout, but prioritizing the mental health of your team has bubbled up to the forefront of a lot of conversations with security leaders, especially in the past year. With the significant risks that come from a burnt out workforce, mental health should be a top priority in 2023. This way security leaders can help to mitigate some of the risks inherent to burnout, whether that’s disgruntled employees potentially becoming malicious insiders or the potential for errors and negligence from a burnt out team that could lead to leaks of sensitive information. In a two-part series for Dark Reading Shamla Naidoo, Head of Cloud Strategy and Innovation, tackled the topic of security leaders and mental health head on. “Companies must confront the mental health crisis, both to ensure a sober response when corporate security is on the line and to create and compete for the best security talent,” Naidoo says. “They need to promote a healthy work-life balance for security folks, and they need to make sure the company provides a safe environment to ask for and participate in mental health support.” She recommends finding ways to equip CISOs with simple tools to help this stress, so as not to distract from their already stressful role.

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