Aviatrix Blog 
Every member of the executive leadership team (ELT) shares a dual mandate: protect the business and drive its growth. As CEO of a cloud networking security company, I’ve witnessed firsthand how essential it is for the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) to have a permanent seat at the leadership table—not as an IT functionary, but as a strategic business leader.
Cybersecurity is no longer just a technical challenge. It is a core business enabler and, if neglected, a critical vulnerability. Companies that fail to embed security leadership into top-level decision-making aren’t just exposed—they’re at a competitive disadvantage.
We’ve elevated our CISO, John Qian, to my executive team and I think all businesses should consider elevating their CISOs to a position of appropriate responsibility and authority.
Here’s why bringing your CISO onto the ELT is a business imperative:
1. Cloud Era: Cyber Risk Equals Business Risk
Cyberattacks have become relentless and increasingly sophisticated. In Q3 2024 alone, organizations experienced an average of 1,876 attacks per week—a staggering 75% increase over the prior year. These aren’t mere disruptions; they’re existential threats. Illustrating this trend, a recent Mandiant report highlights the far-reaching impact of UNC3944 (also known as Scattered Spider), a sophisticated threat actor engaged in ransomware, data theft, and extortion campaigns. UNC3944 has targeted a wide range of sectors—including Technology, Telecommunications, Financial Services, Hospitality, and Retail—demonstrating how a single group can create systemic risk across global supply chains.
But here’s what many CISOs are still learning: the cloud has fundamentally changed the risk equation. What used to be “internal” traffic within a trusted data center now flows across public infrastructure. The traditional castle-and-moat security model has shattered into thousands of micro-perimeters around every workload, VPC, and cloud connection.
Most enterprises don’t realize that their default cloud configurations often allow all outbound traffic—creating invisible highways for attackers to establish command and control channels and move laterally between services.
The CISO is uniquely positioned to help executive teams understand this new reality: that cloud network security isn’t just “networking moved to the cloud”—it’s a complete reimagining of how trust is established and maintained in distributed environments.
Without this understanding at the ELT level, businesses make strategic decisions that inadvertently create massive security blind spots.
2. Secure Cloud Networks Accelerate Innovation
Digital transformation is a cornerstone of growth strategy—whether it’s deploying AI, expanding cloud infrastructure, or launching customer-facing applications. But without a CISO’s early involvement, these innovations can become liabilities. Here’s the critical insight many executives miss: retrofitting security into cloud architectures is exponentially more expensive and risky than building it in from the start.
In traditional data centers, network security was embedded in the physical infrastructure. In the cloud, that embedded security layer simply doesn’t exist by default. Traffic between applications, databases, and services often flows unencrypted and unmonitored across public infrastructure. A CISO who understands this paradigm shift can guide the business toward cloud-native security approaches that enable agility rather than hinder it.
When security is embedded into the cloud fabric from the start—not bolted on as an afterthought—businesses can move faster and with greater confidence. Whether launching a new product or entering a new market, the right cloud network security strategy makes execution safer and faster by ensuring that trust is enforced dynamically where workloads actually communicate.
3. Compliance Demands Cloud-Native Network Controls
While compliance with regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, or PCI-DSS is essential, it’s not enough. Cyber threats move faster than legislation. But here’s what’s often overlooked: many compliance frameworks were written for traditional data center environments and don’t adequately address cloud network security realities.
For example, PCI-DSS requires network segmentation, but in cloud environments, traditional VLAN-based segmentation doesn’t work the same way. A CISO who educates the ELT about these nuances ensures that regulatory requirements are not just met, but implemented in ways that actually enhance security rather than creating compliance theater.
The CISO can help executive teams understand that true cloud compliance requires rethinking network security from first principles—implementing identity-aware segmentation, real-time policy enforcement, and encrypted communication paths that traditional compliance checklists may not explicitly require but are essential for actual security.
4. Build a Cloud-Savvy Security Culture
Business culture cascades from the top. When a CISO is part of the ELT, it signals to every employee, partner, and vendor that security is integral to the company’s mission. But in the cloud era, this means more than just security awareness—it means cloud security literacy.
Many IT and development teams assume that cloud providers handle security for them, when in reality, cloud security operates on a shared responsibility model. The cloud provider secures the infrastructure, but customers are responsible for securing their workloads, data, and network configurations. Without ELT-level understanding of this distinction, organizations make dangerous assumptions about their security posture.
By embedding the CISO into strategic discussions, security becomes a shared mindset across departments—but more importantly, cloud security principles become embedded in how every team thinks about architecture, deployment, and operations.
5. Cloud Security Builds Trust—and Competitive Edge
Today, trust is a market differentiator. Buyers, investors, and partners are increasingly factoring cybersecurity posture into their decision-making. But in the cloud era, security has become a key enabler of business agility and innovation, not just a defensive measure.
A CISO who collaborates with Sales, Marketing, and Product can demonstrate to customers that your cloud architecture isn’t just secure—it’s designed to enable faster innovation, better scalability, and more reliable service delivery.
When customers understand that your cloud network security enables you to deploy updates faster, scale more efficiently, and maintain better uptime, security becomes a revenue driver, not just a cost center.
This is particularly powerful when selling to other enterprises who are struggling with their own cloud security challenges. Your mature cloud security posture can shorten sales cycles, open up new market segments, and increase customer retention by demonstrating thought leadership in an area where most organizations are still learning.
6. Cloud-Native Defense for Coordinated Threats
Cybercriminals are organized, collaborative, and well-funded. They understand cloud architectures better than many of the organizations they’re attacking. Defending against them requires the same level of coordination—and a fundamentally different approach to network security than what worked in traditional data centers.
Modern attacks exploit the implicit trust between cloud services, the lack of east-west traffic visibility, and the assumption that anything “inside” the cloud environment is safe. A CISO on the ELT ensures that all parts of the business understand that cloud security requires:
- Dynamic policy enforcement that moves with workloads as they scale and migrate
- Real-time visibility into traffic patterns that span multiple clouds and regions
- Identity-aware segmentation that goes beyond traditional IP-based controls
- Encrypted communication paths for traffic that now traverses public infrastructure
This isn’t just technical implementation—it’s strategic business architecture that requires coordination across DevOps, Infrastructure, Security, and Business teams.
Key Takeaway—CISOs Bridge Cloud Risk & Growth
If the CFO manages capital and the COO ensures operational excellence, then the CISO safeguards the very foundation of trust, continuity, and resilience that makes business possible in the cloud era. But more than that, the CISO serves as the critical bridge between cloud innovation and business risk management.
The cloud has permanently rewired how applications and services connect, and security frameworks haven’t kept pace with this runtime reality. Today, every enterprise is one misconfigured cloud policy, one unmonitored east-west traffic flow, or one compromised service away from a breach they didn’t see coming.
The CISO who earns their place on the ELT is one who can translate complex cloud network security realities into business language, enabling faster innovation while managing the risks that traditional security approaches simply cannot address.
It’s time we stopped asking whether the CISO belongs in the executive suite.
The better question is: How can we afford to make cloud transformation decisions without the security expertise to understand what we’re actually building?
Curious about other ways to strengthen your organization’s cloud network security?
- Explore 4 cloud egress traffic risks you need to know about.
- Learn how you can protect your network against threats like the Salt Typhoon APT (advanced persistent threat).