Risky Business Features Being a wartime CISO
Mar 6, 2026
Brad Arkin, seasoned security leader and former CISO at Adobe, Cisco and Salesforce, shares wartime CISO realities. He covers who belongs in crisis decision rooms. He weighs keeping office internet for displaced staff against cutting connectivity. He talks through playbooks for shutting down or preserving key material, cloud/data center disaster choices, vendor exposure and using disaster playbooks for rapid coordination.
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Prebuild Playbooks For Rapid Office Wind Downs
- Prepare playbooks now for rapid choices like remotely bricking offices or orderly wind-downs so decisions aren't made from scratch under pressure.
- Plan whether closures should be recoverable, who must physically shut things down, and procedures for severing corporate backhaul while preserving local internet.
Regional Cloud Outages Demand Customer-Specific DR Plans
- Cloud and regional hosting change the calculus: you must know DR capabilities, which customers can be hot-swapped and which require careful migration.
- Brad notes delegating a sub-warroom to map customer-specific migration strategies and communicate priorities with customers.
Reuse Natural Disaster Playbooks For Wartime Response
- Reuse existing mature playbooks like hurricane or natural disaster plans to convene the right people and make fast decisions under evolving conditions.
- Use those frameworks to manage human safety, office outages, and fast-changing news while adapting specific technical responses.