A panel of cybersecurity, audit, emerging technologies and governance experts shared their perspectives and advice Wednesday at ISACA’s first virtual conference as part of North America CACS 2020. Panelists offered insights for navigating the unprecedented changes that business IT professionals face as their enterprises evolve, including challenges accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Here is their advice on how to stay competitive as Industry 4.0 changes how we work.
- Invest in yourself. Keep your credentials and CPEs up to date, and continue your learning and developing new skills. Reach out to who you respect and talk through what you need to work on. Work to understand the interconnected relationships between your work and emerging technologies’ transformational impacts. Find free online resources to learn more about emerging technologies, data analytics and audit analytics. You must be able to audit AI algorithms to have confidence all is working, but keep fine-tuning your core skills in security, risk, audit and governance.
- Blog and promote your personal brand. Use LinkedIn, Medium, ISACA Now and other platforms to share your expertise with your networks and other professionals. (Don’t forget to review your company’s policies related to publishing work).
- Conduct your own research. Take on a small project where you identify and solve a problem, and then write a blog post on LinkedIn and share your findings with your team. “You’ll need to protect and defend but also operate, and work side-by-side with, AI and machine learning,” said panelist Jenai Marinkovic. To become comfortable and competent with working with AI and ML, take a free beginner’s course, experiment, and show your newfound knowledge.
- Learn the business. Find a mentor who can share other business units’ perspectives. Seek someone who you can job shadow. Connect with others from every function of your organization. You need to know who you’re supporting and why you all do what you do. You need to know the risks and problems you are working to solve.
- Be a better communicator. Create engaging presentations and be a persuasive storyteller when describing your work and delivering metrics. Align your function to business goals and share how you can help enable speed and agility to improve the bottom line.
- Be a leader. Learning about leadership and team-building is a critical soft skill. It isn’t natural to know how to elevate others, so learn from those who do it well. Now is the perfect time to demonstrate your leadership by spearheading a post-mortem on what went well and what didn’t when you switched to a remote workforce. What lessons were learned and how were security response scenarios handled with a completely remote team? Use this data to help establish an enterprise-wide cybersecurity incidence response plan focused on remote workers.
- Volunteer. There are opportunities with ISACA (review content, help with product development and more), but you can also reach others and share your expertise as a mentor, resume-reviewer, or speaker for online events. Help others invest in themselves.
Panelists:
Moderator: ISACA Board Director Pam Nigro, CRMA, CISA, CGEIT, CRISC, Senior Director, Information Security/GRC
Shannon Donahue, PhD, CISA, CISSP, Vice President, Content Development and Services at ISACA
Jenai Marinkovic, vCTO/CISO at Tiro Security; Technology & Information Security Consultant at Beyond
Tammy Moskites, CISM, ITIL, CEO & Founder at CyAlliance
