CISO Soft Skills: Securing Organizations Impaired by Employee Politics, Apathy, and Intolerant Perspectives

As organizations struggle to implement effective security measures, all too often they focus solely on the tangible elements, such as developing security policies or risk management implementations. While these items are very important, they are only half of the equation necessary to ensure security success. CISO Soft Skills: Securing Organizations Impaired by Employee Politics, Apathy, and Intolerant Perspectives presents tools that empower security practitioners to identify the intangible negative influencers of security that plague most organizations, and provides techniques to identify, minimize, and overcome these pitfalls.

The book begins by explaining how using the wrong criteria to measure security can result in a claim of adequate security when objective assessment demonstrates this not to be the case. The authors instead recommend that organizations measure the success of their efforts using a practical approach that illustrates both the tangible and intangible requirements needed by a healthy security effort.

The middle section discusses the root causes that negatively influence both a CISO and an organization’s ability to truly secure itself. These root causes include:

• Employee apathy
• Employee myopia or tunnel vision
• Employee primacy, often exhibited as office politics
• The infancy of the information security discipline

These chapters explain what a CISO can do about these security constraints, providing numerous practical and actionable exercises, tools, and techniques to identify, limit, and compensate for the influence of security constraints in any type of organization.

The final chapters discuss some proactive techniques that CISOs can utilize to effectively secure challenging work environments. Reflecting the experience and solutions of those that are in the trenches of modern organizations, this volume provides practical ideas that can make a difference in the daily lives of security practitioners.

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.