CISO Soft Skills: Securing Organizations Impaired by Employee Politics, Apathy, and Intolerant Perspectives

As organizations struggle to implement effective security measures, all too often they focus solely on the tangible elements, such as developing security policies or risk management implementations. While these items are very important, they are only half of the equation necessary to ensure security success. CISO Soft Skills: Securing Organizations Impaired by Employee Politics, Apathy, and Intolerant Perspectives presents tools that empower security practitioners to identify the intangible negative influencers of security that plague most organizations, and provides techniques to identify, minimize, and overcome these pitfalls.

The middle section discusses the root causes that negatively influence both a CISO and an organization’s ability to truly secure itself. These root causes include:

• Employee apathy
• Employee myopia or tunnel vision
• Employee primacy, often exhibited as office politics
• The infancy of the information security discipline

About the Author

Mike Gentile is on a mission to change the status quo in Information Security as we know it. His goal is to translate the discipline from one that is often misunderstood, inefficiently applied, and painful to one that is seamless, collaborative, and repeatable in organizations across the globe. Delphiis is the encapsulation of this mission. Mike brings balance of business acumen and technical skill-set anchored by years in the field and his core focus over the past 15 years has been his practice, Coastline Consulting services.

As a writer he is the co-author of The CISO Handbook: A Practical Guide to Securing Your Company as well as CISO Soft Skills: Securing Organizations Impaired by Employee Politics, Apathy, and Intolerant Perspectives. The CISO Handbook is used as course material for numerous advanced education and Master’s programs on security leadership around the world. Mr. Gentile serves on multiple advisory boards, including being on the Board of Advisors for Savant, a malware protection company, as well an active member of the RSA Program Committee since 2009.

Mr. Gentile is a sought after speaker on security, project management, and information technology topics. For the last 3 years he has been a top rated speaker at RSA, the most prestigious security conference in the United states and has been keynote speaker for the CXO Summits conference series. He has also presented over the years for the Project Management Institute, Secure World Expo, ISSA, Symantec, and many more. Mike lives in Southern California with his wife Tiffany and their two boys.