What matters most? The top three CIO priorities in 2024

The role of the CIO hit a crucible moment several years ago, as the crucial role data plays in successful cybersecurity strategies became more widely understood. This change propelled CIOs into having a much higher profile in the business, greatly increasing the pressure of the role. In this environment, CIOs must align their priorities with their organization’s needs, which can be a challenge in the ever-changing security landscape.

There are three priorities that will form the basis for every successful CIO’s strategic approach this year. First, CIOs will use the rise of generative AI to re-engage every team across their organization to instill a security-first mindset. Second, CIOs must review their organization’s data to ensure that they are driving value in an ethical manner. Third, as security budgets begin to slow after years of hypergrowth, CIOs must optimize their security processes to drive more value from existing investments.  

1. Build an organization-wide security-first mindset

As generative AI becomes more competent and widespread, every CIO is being asked by their CEO and board if they have a strategy to ensure that it doesn’t pose any security risk. While security teams have used AI for data summarization and pattern recognition for several years, other teams – such as legal or marketing – may be less mature in their AI adoption.  

This knowledge gap needs to be closed, and doing so should be a major priority. CIOs must introduce a robust training program to educate every team about their security obligations and ensure these are always a consideration in any project. This will equip every team with the fundamental knowledge they need to understand why security may alter processes or entirely new approaches to key business processes. 

It’s important that this information is available to every team to foster a sense of community around security. After all, when an attack on a single employee can result in large-scale data breaches or significant financial damage, it’s important for CIOs to ensure that everyone in their organization is aware of their security obligations.   

• Clean up your data to see real value

Data management and protection are an overlooked – but crucial – part of security. As individuals have become more data savvy, they are asking for more data to inform decision-making processes.  

However, data management as a critical asset lags behind and is regularly treated as a security afterthought. In concrete terms, this means that rationalizing, cleaning, and securing data are suboptimized, creating another level of vulnerability within organizations.  

Data management can be a lengthy process, but there is a checklist CIOs can use to ensure their priorities are right. They need to know where their data is stored, and how it is found, defined, and how it is secured. Once these steps are complete, CIOs can assess the trustworthiness and context of their data, and interrogate whether it is being used ethically. 

Following this checklist, organizations can ensure they are driving real value with their data to drive revenue, support customers, and help employees be more productive. 

• Optimize spending to protect your organization

Security budgets have increased significantly over the past decade. That trend is now beginning to slow, and while budgets aren’t yet decreasing, they are starting to flatline. This shift requires CIOs to put in significant work to optimize their security spend, not necessarily to do more with less but to demonstrate greater value being drawn from the same security resources.  

To demonstrate the value of their security work, CIOs must contextualize the risk posture of their organization. This requires them to ask what their organization’s risk tolerance is and then develop a plan on how to support that risk level, the timeframe, and how their budget will affect this timeline. This helps CIOs make the business case for their security budget in terms their board can appreciate. It can also help to show CIOs their security pathway, assessing risks by their priority and addressing them in this order.  

To address these risks, it is vital that CIOs set a minimum annual security budget that covers the necessities for their organization. This spend can then be optimized to deliver a security strategy with high business impact.

2024 is the year of business impact for CIOs

CIOs must be clear and unemotional about the security risks their business carries. This will allow them to accurately assess and clearly document where improvements are needed, empowering them to drive operational changes throughout the organization. 

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