How do I become a CISO?

Brian,

There are two industry tracks that typically security professionals and CISO's evolve their careers from

The first group of security professionals come from the system design and administration side of the fence and progress their career into security arena. This group comes from the disciplines of computer science engineering and mathematics. This group makes excellent techies and has command over systems, honeypots, penetration, etc. The career path leads to Technology manager and CTO.

The second group comes from business and accounting side and then specializing into security management and then on to management role. Coming from this school of thought, they have stringent computer science and Information Technology background. They also bring structured learning and training from disciplines as accounting, business law and finance and management. Folks from this camp are excellent forensics, penetration, policy design and enforcement. So, this career path consists of starting at System engineer/ consultant in design or risk assessment and penetration testing and then making their way up to management.

Now, to answer your question, there a few variables that need to considered.

 From your career progression perspective, what size of the company you want to be in? If your goal is to end up in a small or medium company, the pyramid to the top may not be big. On the other hand, if for example your objective is to work for a major telecom company then the pyramid would be very steep. But remember the higher you are on the pyramid the small it is...

Also, you would need to consider the state of the economy and technologies you want to work with! Since you are aiming for CISO spot. As you probably know that in today’s economy the goal of any IT professional is to weather the storm. Likewise, this is not the sellers market; it’s the buyer who is calling the shots. Therefore, resulting in tough competition.

So, the moral of the story is to identify what size of company you want to be in and study long term goals for that sector and then either weather the storm or start prospecting senior managers of that company where you want to be…

Do you need help?

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My 2 cents, hope this helps…

Imran Received on Sun May 18 14:01:43 2003