The Double Standard Facing CISOs: Where Technical Expertise Meets Business Acumen
Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) are often hired for their technical prowess and security experience, but when it comes time to evaluate their performance, they’re judged on a different set of criteria entirely. The disconnect between these two expectations can be particularly challenging for CISOs who rose through the ranks from a technical background, rather than having a business or leadership focus.
During recruitment, the emphasis is on technical depth, security experience, and leadership skills. However, when budget season arrives and the board weighs a leader’s performance, the lens shifts to cost, growth, customer trust, and brand protection. This double standard can make it difficult for CISOs to demonstrate their value to the organization.
Many CISOs feel like they’re stuck in this Catch-22. They’ve spent years developing their technical expertise, but when it comes time to communicate with stakeholders, they struggle to connect their work to business objectives. Their board may not fully understand the intricacies of security, and as a result, they view the CISO’s role as important but not strategic.
This problem is further exacerbated by how success is measured in the CISO role. For too long, proving that nothing went wrong has been seen as the primary metric for success. This creates an impossible assignment, framing the entire function as insurance rather than a business driver. In reality, security plays a significant role in buying decisions, with data privacy and compliance ranking as the single most important customer concern.
A recent survey by McKinsey found that among enterprise technology buyers, cybersecurity was the number one reason they left a provider, ahead of price, coverage, and reliability. Trust makes or breaks the deal, yet at many companies, security is still treated as an afterthought. When CEOs like myself ask our CISOs how they’re doing, we don’t want to know about the alerts they’ve closed; we want to know how they’re making us stronger, helping us grow, and ensuring we can recover if something goes wrong.
The gap between technical expertise and business acumen is hard to close because the work underneath has not changed. Compliance continues to get heavier, with 72% of executives saying it’s hurt their company’s profitability in a recent PwC survey. Teams are left collecting evidence once a year, answering the same questions in slightly different formats for every buyer, and moving on.
However, being secure on paper is not enough. A passed audit or clean dashboard tells you nothing about how the control performed throughout the rest of the year. When customers ask whether that control is working right now, most vendors can only say they think so – a hesitation that can stall deals while everyone waits for confirmation.
To bridge this gap, CISOs need to position themselves as business drivers rather than just insurance providers. They should be running security in a way that moves deals forward, rather than gates them. This means building relationships with stakeholders, creating evidence libraries, and turning security reviews into same-day answers. By doing so, CISOs can demonstrate their value to the organization and help drive growth.
As Dave Brown, CISO of Andesite and author of “The Lean CISO,” put it in a recent podcast interview: “Strategic security leaders should be running security as something that moves deals rather than gate them.” By adopting this mindset, CISOs can start speaking the language of business and demonstrating their impact on the organization’s bottom line.
Source: SecurityWeek — 2026-08-24