Cybersecurity For Cybersecurity Professionals

Many jobs have an obvious focus: sell things, fix things, clean teeth, provide therapy, teach people, write legislation, fly an airplane, bake a cake, fight fires, manage tour groups, trade pork bellies. 

What do cybersecurity professionals do?

A lot of the time you spend on the job being effective involves, let's face it, keeping bad things from happening. And that's good because the average data breach in 2024 was $4.88MM. That's an expensive bad day at the office.

How can you avoid having your company be breached?

One easy answer is to get smarter about the best cybersecurity practices and models. Read our blog posts about them.

Another answer is to be aware of what people do -- get knowledgeable about cybersecurity behavior, not only yours but what your coworkers do. We've written about that too.

Understand how to explain your role not just in technical terms, but in terms of supporting the values of the organization. You should have an 'elevator pitch' about how you focus the cybersecurity spend in your organization on what its leaders value. That's important. Also important: play the politics game and make your boss look like s/he knows what cybersecurity is all about. Just remember that you're a cost center until you figure out how to do that.

In short: our advice is to work on helping other people understand the value you bring, because when you do that you get buy-in for your cybersecurity plans.

It might not be easy but it's part of being a cybersecurity professional.

Pythia Cyber has a track record of thinking about these things with cybersecurity professionals and managers. Ask us how we can improve your cybersecurity IQ.

(phto: https://www.pexels.com/photo/professional-chef-portrait-with-baking-tools-31995485/)