The Top Trends for EMEA CISOs in 2023

Each year at Evanta, a Gartner company, we survey our C-level executive communities to discover their priorities, challenges and goals for the upcoming year. The insights we gather from our annual Leadership Perspective Survey enable us to build world-class agendas – tailored to the specific needs and objectives of each community. 

Initial results from the 700+ responses we received from our CISO communities across the globe outline clear trends which can provide our members with strategic direction, insights into what may be coming next and much-needed validation from peers. 

In this blog, we narrowed the results and are exploring the top priorities for EMEA CISOs for 2023 – namely, their enterprise goals, functional objectives and planned investment areas for the year.

These are the top three enterprise trends we observed for EMEA CISO’s in 2023:

1. Digital Business Acceleration, Increasing Operational Efficiencies and Productivity, and Reducing Risk remain the top 3 enterprise priorities for EMEA CISOs again this year. This differs from CISOs on a global scale, where they list Digital Business Acceleration at #4 for 2023, and Increasing Operational Efficiencies and Productivity and Reducing Risk as #1 and #2, respectively.
2. Optimizing or Reducing Costs has risen to the #4 enterprise priority – up from #6 in 2022. As economic uncertainty persists, we’re seeing CISOs become increasingly focused on how they can continue to deliver value to the business with less.
3. Sustainability and/or ESG is new a new addition to the list this year, and it ranked #6 out of 13 enterprise priorities. Technology leaders are increasingly being called to address sustainability concerns, and it is interesting to see it ranking above other priorities, including “innovating for competitive advantage” which now sits at #7, down from #5 in 2022
   

Here are the top three trends we observed for CISOs’ functional priorities:

1. Cloud Security/Strategy/Architecture, etc. has risen to the #1 functional priority for EMEA CISOs – up from the #2 spot in 2022. This topic also holds the #1 spot for CISOs on a global scale.
2. Measuring & Communicating Risk has dropped to the #2 spot – down from #1 in 2022. Meanwhile, Third-Party Risk Management has remained the #4 functional priority since 2022. While risk management as a broader concept remains a critical area of focus for CISOs, this focus is increasingly shifting toward how risk can be effectively measured and communicated to the board.
3. Incident Response/Ransomware has risen to the #3 spot after being introduced as a new functional priority in 2023. Ransomware is an increasingly pertinent issue for CISOs across the EMEA region and has been a key topic within multiple Evanta programmes, including our Town Halls. Read more on this here.

These are the top three trends we are seeing for CISOs’ investments in 2023:

1. 53% of CISOs have identified an increase in their operating budget for the coming year, down from 60% in 2022, while 31% are not seeing any change in their operating budget in 2023.
2. IAM/Multi-Factor Authentication remains the top investment area for EMEA CISOs in 2023, with almost half of CISOs (48%) planning to spend here. This is up from 41% in 2022.  As remote work continues, this is an especially critical spending area for CISOs.
3. Threat Intelligence has dropped from #3 in 2022 to the #6 planned spending area in 2023. CISO’s are routinely using third-parties to manage their cyber risks and we are seeing a shift to spending on vendor risk management in 2023, which is #4 on the list, up from #5 in 2022.
   
   

Overall, it’s clear that the ever-expanding digital footprint of today’s enterprise is driving security trends in 2023. As the CISO role continues to evolve, greater focus is given to areas such as business enablement and incident response management. Success in securing the digital enterprise will happen when CISOs continue to optimise costs, improve operational efficiencies and reduce risk – all whilst continuing to invest in technologies that support the advancement of their security posture.

View the complete results from Evanta’s annual Leadership Perspective Survey, and join your local CISO community to connect with like-minded peers on these mission critical priorities - apply to join today.