CISO Series Podcast
I'll Show You Our Resilience Plan Once Our Cloud Storage Is Back Online

Every CISO will tell you that resilience is the goal of any security program. But how can we be resilient when every organization is beholden to a bevy of third-party providers, each with their own degrees of resilience?

This week’s episode is hosted by David Spark, producer of CISO Series and Mike Johnson, CISO, Rivian. Joining them is Johann Balaguer, Global CISO, Hard Rock Hotels and Casinos.

Listen to the full episode here.

Understanding the why

Want to be a CISO? What’s your motivation? There are other security and technical jobs that pay better without the stress and accountability, as discussed on a cybersecurity subreddit post. CISOs are no longer technical cyber professionals. The position requires managing GRC, budgets, and board presentations. You’re no longer the defensive authority. You’re an arm of the business, understanding operations while defending intellectual property and customer data. Those chasing the title without understanding the trade-offs end up in situations that don't work well for anyone.

Own your digital self

Will your company use your identity after you leave? Traditional agreements establish that a work product created during employment belongs to the organization. That information is probably being fed into a corporate LLM which could result in your voice or likeness being used at the company in perpetuity. It’s about time we consider digital identity ownership in employment agreements, said GigaOm’s Howard Holton. This isn't a security problem. It's intellectual property and an HR issue requiring legal input. It's already happening through orientation videos featuring long-departed employees. Employees should demand explicit contract language stating companies won't create, maintain, or use AI representations post-employment. Organizations that refuse to document this reveal their intentions. That’s a red flag.

Invest beyond tenure

Career development means preparing employees for success wherever that leads. Effective management prioritizes happiness in current roles first, said Doug Mayer, CISO at WCG. Management can then help identify opportunities elsewhere within security, the broader company, and, if needed, outside the organization. This investment pays through boomerangs, the employees who leave, gain new skills, and return with expanded capabilities. Quit-and-stay employees who mentally check out damage organizations far more than honest departure conversations. Strong leaders encourage team exploration across the organization and continuous skill development, including active succession planning.

Prepare for dependencies

Critical infrastructure isn’t just for utilities anymore, noted Ross Haleliuk of Venture in Security. Hospitals, banks, and national services rely on cloud providers and SaaS platforms. AWS, Google, Microsoft, Stripe, CloudFlare, and Okta outages seemingly exceed those of local utilities. Limited control over these providers makes resilience planning quite difficult, yet still essential. What are the key interdependencies across applications and data? Cloud providers invest heavily in redundancy and failover, but shared responsibility means applications must be architected to leverage these interdependent protections. It’s part of business continuity. How do we account for physical disasters destroying entire data centers? Getting the data back won’t just require another location, but also relocating personnel. 

Listen to the full episode on our blog or your favorite podcast app, where you can read the entire transcript. If you haven’t subscribed to the CISO Series Podcast via your favorite podcast app, please do so now.

Thanks to Louis Zhichao Zhang, AIA Australia for contributing this week’s “What’s Worse?!” scenario.

And thanks to our exposure management security tip sponsor, Tenable.

Huge thanks to our sponsor, Guardsquare

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Security You Should Know
Unifying Detection and Response with Athena Security

In this episode, Peter J Worth Jr, founder, president, and CEO at Athena Security Group, LLC, explains how their security operations platform addresses these challenges through unified detection and response. Joining him are Jason Taule, CISO at Luminous Health, and Will Gregorian, head of security at Galileo Medical.

Want to know:

• Why are security teams still struggling with alert fatigue despite decades of awareness?

• How does security product fragmentation create blind spots in enterprise defense?

• What’s the difference between indicators of compromise and indicators of attack?

• How do AI anomaly detection systems avoid declaring malicious activity “normal”?

• What strategies prevent model drift and adversarial poisoning in AI-based threat detection?

• Why does each client need their own behavioral baseline model?

• How do open source foundations impact enterprise security platform reliability?

• Why are CISOs increasingly held personally accountable for security incidents?

Read the full article and listen to the full episode here.

Thanks to our podcast sponsor, Athena Security

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Ten-second security tip…

“Think of your entire cybersecurity program as the foundation of your house. A poor foundation makes your whole house susceptible to breaking and falling apart. Always ensure your cybersecurity program is built with a strong foundation that bakes in effective basic cybersecurity controls. I always say go back to the basics.“ - Johann Balaguer, Global CISO, Hard Rock Hotels and Casinos

Listen to the full episode of “I'll Show You Our Resilience Plan Once Our Cloud Storage Is Back Online”

How Best to Prepare Your Data for Your Tools

"I think the human can come into the loop at a number of different points, depending on your use of AI. There can be a human in the loop in preparing your data for consumption by AI. There can be a human in the loop in looking at the outputs of data after AI has generated it." - Matt Goodrich, director of information security, Alteryx

Listen to the full episode of “How Best to Prepare Your Data for Your Tools”

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CISO Series Newsletter - Twice every week

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Security You Should Know Newsletter - Weekly

What's the toughest part about cybersecurity marketing?

At Cyber Marketing Con 2025 in Austin, TX, David Spark posed a question to the industry: "What's the toughest part about being a cybersecurity marketer?"

Attendees shared insightful responses on breaking through the noise in a rapidly evolving landscape, building authentic relationships, and influencing internal stakeholders.

Thank you to our event partner, Cybersecurity Marketing Society, and to all participants for their candid insights.

Join the conversation in the LinkedIn comments: What do you think is the toughest challenge in cybersecurity marketing today?

Reddit ‘Ask Me Anything’ – January 2026

Our monthly AMA on r/cybersecurity on Reddit has begun! Our topic is "I had my budget cut and still reduced risk. Ask Me Anything."

For this edition, we’re focusing on a challenge many security leaders face: reducing risk even when budgets are cut. Our panel will share how they managed to keep risk down despite having fewer resources. They'll discuss what strategies worked, what didn’t, and how to prioritize security when money is tight.

Please ask questions for our participants here.

This month’s participants are:

• Gary Hayslip, (u/Shaynei), vp, senior security advisor, Halcyon

• David Cross, (u/MrPKI), CISO, Atlassian

• Nick Espinosa, (u/NickAEsp), host, The Deep Dive Radio Show

• Will Gregorian, (u/wgregorian), former senior director, technology operations and security, Galileo Medical

• Edward Frye, (u/krypt0_ed), head of security, Luminary Cloud

• Dan Walsh, (u/Security_few_sense), CISO, Datavant

Thanks to all of our participants for contributing!

LIVE!
Cybersecurity Headlines - Department of Know

Our LIVE stream of The Department of Know happens every Monday at 4 PM ET / 1 PM PT with CISO Series producer Richard Stroffolino, and a panel of security pros. Each week, we bring you the cybersecurity stories that actually matter, and the conversations you’ll be having at work all week long.

Monday’s episode featured Jason Shockey, CISO, Cenlar FSB, and Krista Arndt, associate CISO, St. Luke's University Health Network. Missed it? Watch the replay on YouTube and catch up on what’s shaping the week in security.

Join us again next week, and every Monday.

Thanks to our Cybersecurity Headlines sponsor, Conveyor

Super Cyber Fridays!
Join us Friday for “Hacking Employee Retention”

Join us on Friday, January 30, 2026, for Super Cyber Friday: “Hacking Employee Retention: An hour of critical thinking about how to keep and develop your talent.”

It all kicks off at 1 PM ET / 10 AM PT, when David Spark will be joined by Andy Ellis, principal, Duha, and Peter Gregory, best-selling cybersecurity author, for an hour of insightful conversation and engaging games. And at 2 PM ET / 11 AM PT, stick around for our always-popular meetup, hosted right inside the event platform.

Register now

Thank you for supporting CISO Series and all our programming

We love all kinds of support: listening, watching, contributions, What's Worse?! scenarios, telling your friends, sharing in social media, and most of all we love our sponsors!

Everything is available at cisoseries.com.

Interested in sponsorship, contact me, David Spark.