Resilience today announced the appointment of Rich Seiersen, previously Chief Risk Officer, to the role of Chief Cyber Resilience Officer (CCRO). The CCRO is an entirely new leadership position dedicated to aligning business objectives and risk management practices, and one we believe will become widespread in all organizations as they work to build true cyber resilience.
Despite an increasingly hostile cybercrime landscape, many organizations remain underprepared for even the most pervasive threats, such as ransomware. This is due in large part to long-standing silos between cybersecurity, risk, and financial leaders. Working in isolation, Risk Managers struggle to accurately forecast and quantify digital risk, CFOs have limited time to review cybersecurity strategies, and CISOs concentrate on fortifying digital perimeters and managing incident responses. These organizational silos often result in miscommunication, inefficient resource allocation, and slow incident response, while potentially exposing the business to severe material losses.
As cyber threats continue to evolve in both severity and variety, collaboration is crucial to achieving a holistic understanding of cyber risk and implementing an effective mitigation strategy. It requires a leader who sits between risk, finance, and security departments and unites them all in pursuit of a common objective: making the business secure to material loss. With Seiersen’s appointment, Resilience has introduced the template for this new role.
“Rich has long been a valued member of the Resilience team, and I can think of no one better suited to serve as the company’s—and industry’s—first CCRO,” said Vishaal “V8” Hariprasad, CEO and Co-Founder of Resilience. “Today’s threat landscape demands a collaborative, organization-wide approach to cyber resilience. The creation of the CCRO position is a natural evolution of that shift, and Rich’s appointment sets an important precedent for the rest of the industry to follow.”
As CCRO, Seiersen’s primary objective is to advocate a cyber resilience strategy that keeps digital risk within tolerable limits. The CCRO position should work with each aspect of the organization, analyzing data from security operations to quantify digital risk and determine tolerable risk limits; translating that risk into financial impact and advocating for cybersecurity capabilities that are economically efficient and address value at risk; and evaluating insurance limits and related coverage in conjunction with recommended cybersecurity capabilities. By pioneering this new role, Seiersen will help show how future CCROs can better understand and prioritize security controls and governance, and reduce the risk that an incident will lead to a catastrophic loss.
Ultimately, the creation of the CCRO position builds on Resilience’s work to make the world more cyber resilient, and provides a blueprint for other organizations to do the same. To learn more about how organizations can build this critical role, read The Rise of the Cyber Resilient Leader and visit www.cyberresilience.com to learn more.
