As organizations scale upward, their technological capacities grow exponentially—as do their cyberdefense needs. Hiring a C-suite executive to oversee all cybersecurity concerns is one approach, but a virtual solution is often more efficient, especially if it’s an AI assisted vCISO.
Is your cybersecurity governance as effective as it can be? Schedule a consultation to find out!
Leverage vCISO AI Capabilities for Cybersecurity
Large, mature organizations often have a chief information security officer (CISO) at the helm of company-wide cybersecurity. However, virtual CISO (vCISO) solutions that leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are a quality alternative for growing organizations.
Understanding how a vCISO can benefit you comes down to learning:
- What a vCISO service is and how it compares to a traditional CISO
- What benefits AI brings to vCISOs who leverage AI, ML, and related tech
- Which areas of cyberdefense benefit most from AI assisted vCISO services
Partnering with the right vCISO team can supercharge your cyberdefenses efficiently.
What is a Virtual Chief Information Security Officer?
A virtual CISO is a service provided by a third-party managed security services provider (MSSP) that covers the same range of responsibilities and features that a traditional CISO would. Rather than employing a single C-suite executive full-time, a vCISO service typically comprises a team of experts who are available on an as-needed basis—and are out of the way when not needed.
The specific offerings associated with a vCISO solution vary widely by provider, but most start with top-down governance and advisory over internal security operations. A vCISO may provide guidance to or directly inform overall security program development. And they may be called upon to provide, improve upon, or mobilize security information and organization-wide security awareness. Finally, they may also strategize, implement, or manage incident response protocol.
But all vCISOs offer a more efficient way to cover the CISO role than the traditional route.
How vCISO Services Stack up Against Traditional CISOs
Generally speaking, the actual functionality that an organization gets out of a CISO or vCISO will be similar if not identical. If implementing either for the first time, they will be tasked with the same responsibilities, and, if migrating from traditional to virtual, the latter will be asked to cover what the former had. The difference is in how—and how efficiently—each achieves its goals.
Here’s what you can expect from a traditional CISO as compared to a vCISO:
- Traditional CISO – A traditional CISO is a single individual whose expertise creates high demand. This results in competitive pay, along with challenging recruitment and retainment. Once installed, CISOs’ control is unified but often at the expense of flexibility.
- vCISO Services – A vCISO solution comprises multiple experts whose expertise is highly varied, maximizing flexibility in governance. In addition, there is far less pressure on recruitment and retention. So, total expenses are significantly lower than a CISO’s.
These benefits of the vCISO option are even greater when the vCISO partner you work with uses AI technologies to enhance their offerings, supercharging your organization’s defenses.
How AI Enables Powerful, Efficient vCISO Services
Although CISOs and vCISOs can be expected to perform the same basic functions for an organization, vCISOs that leverage AI tools add a major advantage in terms of efficiency. A vCISO partner who leverages AI can automate many of the baseline functions in the CISO role, reducing resource costs and increasing bandwidth for other, mission-critical aspects of security.
However, it’s not just about efficiency. AI and ML tools also expand vCISOs’ capabilities.
Enhanced Data Analytics for Proactive Risk Mitigation
The most immediate implication of AI for vCISOs and other cybersecurity applications is the ability to process more information, of greater depth and complexity, at faster rates than ever before. One of the ways this capacity is most useful is in threat and vulnerability management.
In security circles, risk is an expression of the relationship between these two inputs:
- Vulnerabilities – These are gaps or issues within an organization’s IT and security deployment that could be exploited by a threat actor or compromised by other means, such as accidental breaches brought on by poor awareness or natural disasters.
- Threats – These are the vectors that could exploit vulnerabilities and cause harm to your systems, inadvertently or through intentional attacks (i.e., hacking, phishing, etc.).
Understanding these data points more thoroughly allows for more accurate risk calculations. In particular, organizations can understand how much risk they are exposed to and how likely it is.
Then, these values can be used to rank and prioritize risk mitigation—also with the help of AI.
Reaping The Benefits of AI Assisted vCISO Services
Simply put, the best way to get the most out of vCISO services is to seek out a vCISO partner who’s using AI tools to their fullest capabilities. This way, you get more security for less spend.
As noted above, AI and ML technologies allow for unprecedented analytical capabilities, such as processing more threat and vulnerability inputs than ever before and running through increasingly complex risk simulation scenarios. As a result, AI assisted vCISOs give their partner organizations access to deep, actionable risk intelligence that they can use to improve perimeter defenses, internal communications, contingency infrastructure, and overall security.
And, for organizations scaling into new locations or across industries, vCISOs help streamline the various governance and regulatory requirements imposed by legal or industry authorities.
Cyberdefense Design, Implementation, and Management
An effective vCISO team will help your organization plan and develop or acquire cybersecurity architecture that meets your specific needs and means. This includes both individual tools, like firewalls and web filtering, and more systematic approaches, like cloud security implementation.
In addition, vCISO services include management for cross-system strategies such as identity and access management (IAM), third party risk management (TPRM), managed detection and response (MDR), and more. One of the best ways to ensure that all systems like these are functioning in concert is to unify them under the direction of a single party—a vCISO.
Your vCISO provider should also be able to tailor these programs to your compliance needs…
Streamlined Governance and Regulatory Compliance
Maybe most importantly, vCISO services help organizations align their security governance with legal, industry, and other regulations regarding how they must store and protect sensitive data.
For example, consider a handful of widely applicable regulations you may be subject to:
- The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) applies to organizations both within and adjacent to the healthcare field, along with select business associates.
- The Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standards (DSS) apply unilaterally across organizations that process credit card payments or store cardholder data (CHD).
- The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) applies to most entities that process data belonging to EU residents, irrespective of where the organizations are located.
Working with a vCISO, you’ll be able to minimize overlap between these and other programs’ requirements, schedule assessments conveniently, and ensure seamless long-term compliance.
Optimize Your Cyberdefense with vCISO AI Today
Ultimately, vCISO services offer organizations all of the security assurance that traditional CISOs do—often even more—at a fraction of the resource costs. By leveraging AI, vCISOs maximize their ability to process internal and external threat information, powering effective planning, implementation, and management of security and compliance across an organization.
RSI Security has provided vCISO and program advisory services to countless organizations, across all industries and stages of growth. We know that the right way is the only way to keep your staff and clientele safe, and we’re committed to leveraging AI to help you do so efficiently.
To learn more about our AI assisted vCISO services, contact RSI Security today!
