Mr. Khalid Waheed Abdulrahman, Chief Information Security Officer at Al Baraka Islamic Bank – Bahrain, stressed that building links between the organization’s information technology and security team and its financial affairs team allows it to identify risks and cyber threats before they arise. In addition to developing effective solutions and assigning an appropriate budget to mitigate and avoid the expansion of these threats.
This was stated during Mr. Waheed’s participation as a key speaker in a seminar organized by NGN International, a Bahraini IT systems integrator and security services provider, under the topic “How to secure your cybersecurity budget?” and came within the activities of “NGN Majlis” to promote cybersecurity awareness among various public and private sector entities.
Mr. Waheed said: “Inside the organization, establishing a cybersecurity strategy is a significant task. To comprehend what is happening in the organization’s environment and recommend appropriate technical solutions, information technology and security professionals and executives should collaborate with the finance team. They should create an environment where the perspectives of finance and business, information technology, and cybersecurity are linked, and then put them into practice as financial management strategies to improve the necessary cyber protection.”
Mr. Waheed added that the majority of businesses and institutions face ongoing information security threats. Building cybersecurity solutions and having a thorough awareness of and adherence to data security standards by the company are both necessary in light of the ongoing complexity of cyber threats that organizations must cope with and the potential they have to impact business operations.
According to Mr. Waheed, to build a successful defense budget against cyberattacks, the organizational financial and technology members must work in harmony. In order to create a strategic budget that safeguards the company from potential cyber risks, this is accomplished through integration and collaboration between all members of the organization’s finance team and technical team.
Mr. Waheed explained: “To create a successful cybersecurity budget, appropriate actions must be taken, such as prioritizing vulnerable assets such as servers and end-user systems. The organization’s need for cyber protection systems is then assessed, leading to the establishment of a model to evaluate cybersecurity effectiveness. Then comes the role of the financial team in preparing the ROI analysis to investigate the feasibility of purchasing and activating these systems in the organization.”