How businesses should think about their cybersecurity investments?

Shamla Naidoo, head of cloud strategy and innovation at Netskope and a former CISO, argues that security leaders will only be invited into the C-suite if they treat every business change as an opportunity rather than a threat. She walks through the forces reshaping organisations (digital-first consumers, heavier privacy and security regulation, geopolitical tension, climate pressure and cheap, ubiquitous technology such as IoT and cloud) and shows how each one expands the attack surface while also opening new markets. Her thesis is that a larger technology footprint means more exposure, so security must become agile, fast and elastic enough to let the business grow and shrink with demand. She reframes data as a business asset to be protected and mined with AI rather than deleted, urges security teams to apply the same analytics to their own alert volumes, and describes Zero Trust as adjusting trust through visibility and control rather than distrusting partners. She closes on executive communication: earn credibility with metrics and demonstrable risk reduction, tailor the message to each executive's fears, and fold the security strategy into the single corporate strategy rather than running a parallel one.