The Importance of Perspective in Cybersecurity

by | Dec 10, 2020 | CISO, Cybersecurity, Podcast - Life of a CISO | 0 comments

The Importance of Perspective in Cybersecurity

This episode is all about the importance of perspective.

This partially refers to seeing opportunities where others see loss, but it also refers to how you view your equipment and how you focus your time, energy, and money in your work day.

Dr. Eric Cole begins this episode by giving his perspective of 2020. As a year, most people think it stunk, but he saw huge opportunities.

Remember, perspective is everything.

Listen to this episode to learn about the importance of perspective in cybersecurity.

In this episode:

  • 0:10 Intro
  • 0:40 It’s all about perspective
  • 1:46 Nobody said 2020 was a good year
  • 2:18 The stories we tell ourselves are based on emotions, not factual data
  • 2:56 Cautiously pessimistic
  • 3:18 Introducing “John,” my CIA friend
  • 4:19 Why being positive is bad
  • 5:00 The quality that makes a good executive makes a bad security engineer
  • 6:36 Being pessimistic is good for security engineers, but an executive needs to be optimistic
  • 8:21 A commute takes time and energy, now there’s no commute
  • 9:25 The benefit of covid is that it gives us a chance to build a robust architecture
  • 9:43 Let’s face it, we don’t have a robust architecture
  • 10:22 Your laptop is a personal server
  • 12:14 Horizon 2020, Piece 1: All your data is moved to the cloud
  • 14:17 A front-tier cloud for authentication
  • 14:55 How to think about this
  • 16:28 A CISO sometimes needs to keep security engineers at bay
  • 17:32 You always evaluate a new program compared to the old one
  • 18:35 There is no perfect solution
  • 19:29 The problems that using laptops solves.
  • 21:05 But eric…
  • 23:20 Before you spend a dollar or a minute, ask what is the risk, is it the highest priority, and is your solution the most cost-effective way of reducing the risk?
  • 25:42 The one page security assessment
  • 26:25 How do you make money, what differentiates you from the competition
  • 27:01 What are the top threats
  • 27:48 List 5-7 items that you focus on for that quarter
  • 29:09 A good CISO sees opportunities
  • 29:41 Wrap up