Selling Information Security to the Board

CHAPTER 3: SELF-PREPARATION: UNDERSTAND THE BUSINESS

As I said in my introduction, top management is primarily interested in what makes the business work, not in the technology that underpins it. The attention span of individual senior managers can be short and, if their attention is not caught by an issue, they move on to something else without even getting interested in the subject. And if you talk to them in a language they don’t understand, you won’t even capture their attention.

‘Techtalk’ is a language the board doesn’t understand. Security layers, protocols, OSes (operating systems), petabytes, virtualisation and TLAs (three letter acronyms) all leave the board cold.

If you’re going to have a conversation with the board, you have to speak ...