Tag: jobs

  • Why virtual CISOs can’t replace real security leadership

    Over the past few years, the term Virtual CISO – or vCISO – has become increasingly popular, especially among small and mid-sized companies looking to outsource their cybersecurity leadership. On paper, the model looks attractive: a part-time consultant with solid experience in security, providing strategic oversight at a fraction of the cost of a full-time hire.

    But here’s the uncomfortable truth: Virtual CISOs don’t really exist.

    Because being a CISO isn’t just about technical expertise or governance frameworks. It’s about living and breathing the business. And that kind of involvement can’t be dialed in over Zoom a few hours a week.

    The CISO Role Is Not (Just) Technical

    A Chief Information Security Officer isn’t a technical resource – or at least, not primarily. A CISO makes strategic decisions, navigates organizational politics, drives cultural change, translates cyber risk into business impact, and collaborates with legal, HR, finance, product, and IT at all levels.

    To do this effectively, a CISO must have first-hand knowledge of how the company operates: the trade-offs, the priorities, the financial constraints, the product strategy, and even the internal frictions between departments. These are insights you don’t gain from outside the organization.

    A CISO needs to be inside the business – not adjacent to it.

    The Structural Limits of the vCISO Model

    Let’s be clear – the issue is not with the technical capabilities of virtual CISOs. Many of them have exceptional experience and credentials. But that experience is often too generalized to substitute for the contextual depth required by a security executive embedded in the day-to-day life of a business.

    Security leadership cannot be abstract. It needs to be grounded in the company’s operating model and risk appetite. It requires proximity to real-time decision-making, participation in executive discussions, and trust built over time within cross-functional teams.

    A virtual CISO isn’t in the room when strategic pivots are made. They’re not in crisis calls at 10 p.m. after a breach. They’re not negotiating live with product managers facing critical release deadlines. And because of that, they can’t act as the real-time translator between business needs and security controls, one of the CISO’s most important responsibilities.

    Being a CISO Is About Identity, Not Deliverables

    Too often, companies treat the CISO as a compliance requirement, a checkbox on an audit form. In those cases, the virtual CISO model may seem like a cost-effective compromise. But that’s a fundamental misunderstanding of what a CISO actually is.

    A CISO isn’t a PDF report or a quarterly roadmap review. A true CISO is a leader, someone who earns internal trust, navigates risk with nuance, and influences decisions across the entire business.

    You can’t do that without presence, context, and skin in the game.

    Conclusion

    There are scenarios where a vCISO makes sense: short-term engagements, early-stage startups, or specific compliance initiatives. But in a company that takes security seriously as a strategic function, the only real model is that of an internal, dedicated, embedded CISO.

    Security doesn’t scale through detachment. It scales through integration. And that requires a security leader who’s not just observing the business – but actively part of it.

    To put it plainly: Virtual CISOs don’t exist. There are CISOs, and there are consultants. They are not the same.

  • How AI is impacting the cybersecurity jobs landscape

    The cybersecurity industry is standing at the precipice of a technological inflection point. Artificial intelligence and automation are no longer aspirational buzzwords—they are redefining operational realities across the digital threat landscape. Among all domains within cybersecurity, the Security Operations Center (SOC) is emerging as the first and most significantly impacted environment. This is not merely a trend, it is an operational inevitability. The traditional SOC model, built around human-driven, round-the-clock monitoring and incident response, is increasingly being replaced by intelligent agents capable of executing these activities with unprecedented speed, scale, and consistency.

    SOCs have long been the tactical backbone of enterprise cybersecurity, responsible for monitoring telemetry, triaging alerts, and executing incident response procedures. However, the daily workload within a SOC is inherently repetitive and heavily reliant on predefined playbooks. These characteristics make it highly susceptible to disruption through automation. The introduction of AI-driven agents, capable of parsing vast datasets, contextualizing threat intelligence, and initiating remediation protocols in real time is fundamentally altering how security operations are performed. The Tier 1 analyst role, traditionally tasked with alert triage and low-level investigation, is already being marginalized as AI systems achieve parity and, in many cases, outperform humans in speed and accuracy. The natural progression will see Tier 2 responsibilities, such as enrichment, correlation, and containment, increasingly delegated to autonomous systems as well.

    This transition is not eliminating the need for cybersecurity professionals; rather, it is redefining the competencies that will be most valuable. Operational roles centered around manual execution are giving way to functions that require system-level thinking, AI model supervision, automation engineering, and strategic response oversight. Analysts who once focused on log analysis and repetitive triage will need to evolve into automation orchestrators and AI supervisors, tasked with training, fine-tuning, and validating the behavior of intelligent agents. The future SOC will be staffed not with alert chasers, but with engineers and cyber strategists managing an ecosystem of autonomous responders.

    From a business perspective, the automation of SOC functions introduces a new operating model centered on resilience, scalability, and cost-efficiency. The ability to respond to threats in milliseconds, independent of human limitations, enhances an organization’s security posture while simultaneously reducing reliance on hard-to-fill human roles. This does not suggest the obsolescence of the human analyst; rather, it underscores the necessity of redefining their purpose within a modernized SOC. Human expertise will be redirected toward validating critical decisions, managing edge-case escalations, and refining the automation logic that powers the AI agents.

    The convergence of AI and automation is not simply changing how SOCs operate, it is setting the stage for a complete realignment of the cybersecurity labor market. As intelligent agents become the first responders in the digital battlefield, cybersecurity professionals must adapt by acquiring new skills, embracing automation-first methodologies, and rethinking their roles within the broader threat management lifecycle. SOC and response automation is not a marginal efficiency gain, it is the first wave of a systemic transformation. Those who invest in upskilling, proactive planning, and strategic adaptation will not only remain relevant but become indispensable in the next generation of cybersecurity operations.