CISO Handbook : A Practical Guide to Securing Your Company

The CISO Handbook: A Practical Guide to Securing Your Company provides unique insights and guidance into designing and implementing an information security program, delivering true value to the stakeholders of a company. The authors present several essential high-level concepts before building a robust framework that will enable you to map the concepts to your company’s environment.

The book is presented in chapters that follow a consistent methodology – Assess, Plan, Design, Execute, and Report. The first chapter, Assess, identifies the elements that drive the need for infosec programs, enabling you to conduct an analysis of your business and regulatory requirements. Plan discusses how to build the foundation of your program, allowing you to develop an executive mandate, reporting metrics, and an organizational matrix with defined roles and responsibilities. Design demonstrates how to construct the policies and procedures to meet your identified business objectives, explaining how to perform a gap analysis between the existing environment and the desired end-state, define project requirements, and assemble a rough budget. Execute emphasizes the creation of a successful execution model for the implementation of security projects against the backdrop of common business constraints. Report focuses on communicating back to the external and internal stakeholders with information that fits the various audiences.

Each chapter begins with an Overview, followed by Foundation Concepts that are critical success factors to understanding the material presented. The chapters also contain a Methodology section that explains the steps necessary to achieve the goals of the particular chapter.

Mike Gentile is on a mission to change the status quo in Information Security as we know it. His goal is to translate the discipline from one that is often misunderstood, inefficiently applied, and painful to one that is seamless, collaborative, and repeatable in organizations across the globe. Delphiis is the encapsulation of this mission.

Mike brings balance of business acumen and technical skill-set anchored by years in the field and his core focus over the past 15 years has been his practice, Coastline Consulting services. As the Founder and President, Coastline has developed enterprise security programs for countless leading public, private, and government organizations, including many within the Global 1000 and Fortune 500. During that time he also became Co-Founder and Editor for CISOHandbook.com, the leading portal for security leaders.

As a researcher, Mike has contributed numerous publications within the Information technology, project management, and security communities. He is also a senior researcher with Computer Economics in the Information Security domain and has written articles for the ISSA Journal, Computer Economics, RSA Conference and Secure World Expo.

As a writer he is the co-author of The CISO Handbook: A Practical Guide to Securing Your Company as well as CISO Soft Skills: Securing Organizations Impaired by Employee Politics, Apathy, and Intolerant Perspectives. The CISO Handbook is used as course material for numerous advanced education and Master’s programs on security leadership around the world. Mr. Gentile serves on multiple advisory boards, including being on the Board of Advisors for Savant, a malware protection company, as well an active member of the RSA Program Committee since 2009.

Mr. Gentile is a sought after speaker on security, project management, and information technology topics. For the last 3 years he has been a top rated speaker at RSA, the most prestigious security conference in the United states and has been keynote speaker for the CXO Summits conference series. He has also presented over the years for the Project Management Institute, Secure World Expo, ISSA, Symantec, and many more. Mike lives in Southern California with his wife Tiffany and their two boys.