The Tuesday afternoon keynote, Spanning the Globe: The State of the Industry from the People Who Run It, at RSA Conference featured six leaders in a series of short interviews who shared insights and perspectives on their experiences over the past year. Joining moderator Hugh Thompson, Program Chair for RSA Conference, were Darren Kane, Chief Security Officer, nbn™ Australia; Florence Mottay, SVP Information Security & Global CISO at Ahold Delhaize; Lakshmi Hanspal, Global CSO, Box; Marene Allison, Chief Information Security Officer, Johnson & Johnson; Phil Venables, CISO and VP, Google Cloud; and Reem Al-Shammari, Digital Transformation Leader of Corporate Solutions and Digital Oil Fields, Kuwait Oil Company.

Leading off the segment, Mottay shared a program that she rolled out within the cybersecurity team at Ahold Delhaize that she referred to as a daily vitamin shot. “In our line of security work, we’re used to dealing with crises, but [the pandemic] was very different in that it also affected all of us personally,” Mottay explained. Mottay led by example, sharing with her team the struggles of what her own day looked like balancing the new normal, establishing an environment of openness and honesty where people felt comfortable talking about challenges and fears, and asking for and offering help. “This became glue for everyone as we became even more committed to each other personally and professionally.”

Hanspal cited a similar experience at Box, recommending that leaders should be open about what they are dealing with, helping to disarm concerns of their teams. “Resilience is about leading and operating with empathy. We all have a number of distractions in the work-from-home environment. Honor those distractions and make them part of the DNA with which we operate.” From a corporate resilience standpoint, she also discussed the many layers integrated into the security ecosystem, which is critical as we “shift into next,” and the changes to boundaries of trust and the importance of building and working with the community to amplify the effectiveness of public/private partnerships.

Speaking with the inspirational voice of the leader that she is, Allison explained that in the past year, she was able to draw on all of the “arrows in the quiver” that she’s put there over her career, making use of skills, learnings and relationships that were already in place. She said that “being a CISO is not for the faint of heart,” but also that the experiences we’re having in our cybersecurity careers build upon each other, preparing us well for whatever challenges we may face. She praised the ability of her team—and the extended cybersecurity community—in being able to effectively pivot into this new digital economy with new remote ways of doing things.

Venables put forward a clear vision for the future—one where security and usability are not at odds, for external customers or for internal workforces. He eloquently explained that good security isn’t just about mitigating risk but also providing adjacent business benefits. He issued a clear challenge to the industry with a promise of strong returns, citing the cybersecurity skills challenge that many organizations face. “We can 10x the productivity of the cybersecurity professionals that we already have through radical improvements to the tooling we give them to do their jobs.”

Increasing business opportunity was also a theme for Kane, who predicted that the CISO role will develop and grow into that of a Chief Trust Officer. “Security and reliability combined is trust; people trust that organization or the service or product it provides, and if we are a more trusted organization, because [we’re] more reliable and more secure, it is a competitive advantage. Trust will actually increase revenue because people believe in the product.”