The Chief Security Officer (CSO) is the executive responsible for the organization's entire security plan, both physical and cyber, and has the big picture view of the company's operational risk, according to an article on the CSO website.
CSOs also frequently own or participate closely in related areas such as business continuity planning, loss prevention and fraud prevention, and privacy.
According to the article, a CSO, above all, needs to create a way for the company to think about security as a strategic asset and part of its mission, not just as an afterthought or part of a damage control scenario.
"There's enough of a sample size of attacks and breaches to know that companies need to be taking security seriously now," Paul Wallenberg, team lead of technology recruiting at LaSalle Network, said in the article.