After a disruptive couple of years, we’re emerging into a much more digitised world with consumers and businesses capable of doing more than ever before. However, that progress hasn’t been reserved only for them – the threat landscape has similarly evolved, with bad actors intensifying their use of advanced technology to conduct more determined attacks on their victims.

This shift can be perfectly encapsulated in the number of zero-days we’ve witnessed over the past year. Zero-day refers to a breach or attack that happened because of a vulnerability in a piece of software that has yet to be patched because it hasn’t been discovered yet.

The past 12 months have seen a record high number of zero-days ever, according to Project Zero, a Google-funded team responsible for disclosing these sorts of bugs to vendors. And while this indicates greater transparency and dedication by security researchers to warn against these sorts of attacks, it leaves security professionals with the daunting challenge of continuously patching their critical – and vulnerable – estates.

The evolving role of the CISO

CISOs have a vital role to play when it comes to elevating their company’s security posture to protect it from threats.

CISOs, in partnership with identified stakeholders in technology, operations, and business design, lead changes that are meant to strengthen their organisation’s cybersecurity while elevating overall digital trust. To achieve this, they need to involve themselves in the business/product roadmap conversations and create a cybersecurity ecosystem within the enterprise. This will help create a culture of awareness, ownership, and accountability around security within the larger organisation from the get-go.

However, this is easier said than done. There are several factors that can impact a firm’s adaptation of a successful security strategy. Some factors are: a product’s time to market; the movement to hybrid work and the inherent exposure of a firm’s key assets in such a model; and employee engagement, especially as work-from-anywhere picks up pace. CISOs need to continually review and reprioritise adaption of security…