A Kaspersky study has revealed that every third C-level executive (34%) struggles to speak about adopting new security solutions with their IT or IT security colleagues. The latter however, feel increasing the budget for cyber security is the toughest topic to discuss with non-IT management.
According to the poll the majority IT workers say that the main reason their cyber security budge was lowered was that top management sees no reason to invest much in this sphere. Kaspersky conducted a special survey to explore if this situation might be a result of unclear communication between IT security staff and executives, and discover whether there is a lack mutual understanding between these two tribes.
The study reveals that, while almost half of top managers (42%) think IT-security employees should better communicate cyber risks to business, only 10% of cybersecurity workers admit they have some difficulties explaining any aspect of their work to non-IT colleagues and executives.
IT and non-IT workers also differ on the most complicated topics to debate. C-level executives’ three toughest subjects to talk about with IT staff are: adopting new security solutions (34%), changes to the cybersecurity policy (29%) and evaluating the IT security team’s performance (29%).
For IT workers the top-3 toughest themes to discuss with non-IT executives are the need to increase the IT security budget (51%), raising cybersecurity awareness among employees (43%) and expanding the IT security team (43%).
On the subject of finding common ground, the majority of respondents agree that the most efficient ways to facilitate discussions about IT-security issues are to choose real life examples and to use reports and numbers. Besides these topics C-level executives also said that citing references to authoritative opinions (35%) would allow them to best understand their IT-security staff. The IT teams, on the other hand, believe threat stories (50%) will help them to better communicate with executives.
“It can be assumed that non-IT executives struggle to discuss the adoption of new cybersecurity solutions because of the abundance of complex technical terms and concepts often used by IT security staff. The latter, however, don’t like to speak about increasing budgets since C level executives expect them to use businessmetrics to justify their needs“. says Ivan Vassunov, VP, Corporate Products, Kaspersky. “Today, in a difficult economic environment and complicated threat landscape mutual understanding between business and IT security people is more important for business continuity than ever before. To avoid additional cybersecurity risks it is crucial that both teams know how to speak a common language based on numbers, reliable references and understandable arguments”.
