Cybersecurity Readiness
A Holistic and High-Performance Approach
- Dave Chatterjee - University of Georgia
"Information security has become an important and critical component of every organization. In his book, Professor Chatterjee explains the challenges that organizations experience to protect information assets. The book sheds light on different aspects of cybersecurity including a history and impact of the most recent security breaches, as well as the strategic and leadership components that help build strong cybersecurity programs. This book helps bridge the gap between academia and practice and provides important insights that may help professionals in every industry."
Mauricio Angee, Chief Information Security Officer, GenesisCare USA, Fort Myers, Florida, USA
"This book by Dave Chatterjee is by far the most comprehensive book on cybersecurity management. Cybersecurity is on top of the minds of board members, CEOs, and CIOs as they strive to protect their employees and intellectual property. This book is a must-read for CIOs and CISOs to build a robust cybersecurity program for their organizations."
Vidhya Belapure, Chief Information Officer, Huber Engineered Materials & CP Kelco, Marietta, Georgia, USA
Cybersecurity has traditionally been the purview of information technology professionals, who possess specialized knowledge and speak a language that few outside of their department can understand. In our current corporate landscape, however, cybersecurity awareness must be an organization-wide management competency in order to mitigate major threats to an organization’s well-being—and be prepared to act if the worst happens.
With rapidly expanding attacks and evolving methods of attack, organizations are in a perpetual state of breach and have to deal with this existential threat head-on. Cybersecurity preparedness is a critical and distinctive competency, and this book is intended to help students and practitioners develop and enhance this capability, as individuals continue to be both the strongest and weakest links in a cyber defense system.
In addition to providing the non-specialist with a jargon-free overview of cybersecurity threats, Dr. Chatterjee focuses most of the book on developing a practical and easy-to-comprehend management framework and success factors that will help leaders assess cybersecurity risks, address organizational weaknesses, and build a collaborative culture that is informed and responsive. Through brief case studies, literature review, and practical tools, he creates a manual for the student and professional alike to put into practice essential skills for any workplace.
This book is a valuable resource for cybersecurity readiness today. Many breaches in the past could have been prevented. This book reviews past leadership decisions and breach examples to provide an effective approach using lessons learned and best practices.
Prof. Chatterjee’s book is a very pragmatic and comprehensive guide to cybersecurity readiness. The governance framework is both powerful and easy to comprehend. Anchored on three high-performance security culture dimensions of commitment, preparedness, and discipline, the framework presents a set of seventeen cybersecurity success factors. Uncovered from analyzing primary and secondary data gathered over several years, these success factors encompass people-, process-, and technology-driven measures. Numerous breach incidents, presented in the form of vignettes and cases, are used to highlight vulnerabilities and lessons learned. The book also provides useful resources such as cybersecurity readiness scorecard elements; a list of physical, technical, and administrative controls; an information security monitoring control guide; an overview of cybersecurity and privacy laws and regulations; cybersecurity performance measures; and case studies.
Dr. Chatterjee’s book fortifies the most essential truth when it comes to effective cybersecurity programs: “technology alone will not mitigate cybersecurity risks.” He identifies key traits that need to be engrained in organizational culture to support the cybersecurity mission as well as seventeen success factors within that cultural framework that any student or practitioner should consider when evaluating their security posture.
Dr. Dave’s book on cybersecurity management is an eye opener for all organizations in today’s world. He has taken tremendous efforts in presenting how to identify, defend, respond, and build resilience in case of cyberattacks in a very simple way. This book is very easy to understand and very important for the senior leadership team of an organization to gain thorough knowledge on the subject of cybersecurity.
Cyber threats, in their many and continuously evolving ways, remain more than ever an existential threat to virtually all companies, both large and small. In his new book Cybersecurity Readiness: A Holistic and High- Performance Approach, Dr. Chatterjee does an excellent job of breaking down these threats and providing a framework for creating a culture of engagement at all levels in an organization to effectively and proactively manage these threats. In my years leading enterprise IT organizations, I can personally attest to the effectiveness of the concepts outlined here and I wholeheartedly recommend this book. In fact, I believe that this should be required reading for anyone entering today’s workforce, regardless of their role. Cybersecurity is not an IT issue, which Dr. Chatterjee makes clear, but rather something that requires everyone’s knowledge and involvement. A must read!
Public and hybrid cloud adoption have made the boundaries of corporate IT infrastructure more nebulous, and the need for a well-defined and executed security strategy has never been greater. As companies increasingly pursue the financial benefits of cloudification by virtualizing and containerizing their application architectures, the architectural complexity and the number of potential vulnerabilities significantly increase. Dr. Chatterjee does a superb job of portraying both the business need and the technology approach to define a successful security strategy
Our financial lives, our business lives, and even our personal lives are all online. Cybersecurity is a non-negotiable investment for almost every company in our global community. Just as we have to make sure people walking into a store are physically safe during their experience, we have to ensure their information is safe when they ‘walk into” the cyber version. Professor Chatterjee’s book highlights the traits of a high-performing information security culture: commitment, preparedness, and discipline. His insight and accessible tactics make this book mandatory for any institution looking to mitigate financial and reputational risk.
Commitment, preparedness, and discipline in cybersecurity are things Professor Chatterjee has been advocating for many years. The book is a comprehensive summary for executives who wish to understand how cybersecurity has moved from a “techie” topic to a serious boardroom agenda and what organizations should be doing to not only defend, but also respond and build resilience in case of a cyberattack. Professor Chatterjee’s writing style is simple and offers an engaging, informative, and most importantly, actionable read and is highly recommended as an executive leadership must-read and must-discuss book.
Information security is a part of everyone’s responsibility; yet, too many people and organizations still do not completely understand and embrace this. People (and organization culture) continue to be the weakest link in most organization’s security postures. Too often, information security teams focus on technical solutions and audit-driven processes, while not being able to drive the organization-wide awareness, buy-in, and culture change that is needed to holistically secure the enterprise.
Dr. Chatterjee’s Cybersecurity Readiness: A Holistic and High- Performance Approach tackles this weakest link, the hardest part of information security. He uses high-performance culture traits, supporting success factors, and actionable guiding questions to integrate top-down and bottom-up human-centric approaches, to permeate information security awareness and ownership across the organization. His Cybersecurity Readiness Scorecard, built from these guiding questions, is an effective way to periodically assess and quantify an organization’s cultural cybersecurity maturity.
This book is definitely a must-read for everyone in the knowledge economy. If your organization uses this approach to fortify its cybersecurity culture, it will ultimately save your jobs and your reputation, enhance your competitiveness, and avoid millions to billions of dollars in costs down the line! Cancel the rest of your meetings today and start reading!
Professor Chatterjee’s book is a must-read for any executive who views their organizations’ data as a strategic asset. It is one of the finest works I have read on giving a broad understanding of the dangerous cyber world we live in and why it is here to stay with us. His work provides an excellent framework for building and sustaining a high-performance security
culture, with appropriate systems and processes, to achieve cyber-risk resilience and operate business with confidence rather than fear.
