Quite a few people in charge of cybersecurity at big companies earn close to a million dollars per year. However, with the dream salary comes nightmare responsibilities.
I may be exaggerating slightly, though not about the salary. A recent survey of 862 chief information security officers (CISOs) by IANS and Artico Search found that the bigger the company, the more its security head earns. Still, most CISOs also report being open to changing jobs within the next 12 months.
The bigger the company, the more the CISO earns. On average, the total compensation for large enterprise CISOs is $700,000. However, those working for firms with $20B+ revenue get $1.1 million on average.
Naturally, the highest-paid CISOs operate enormous security budgets – often seven to eight figures – and manage teams of over 200 people.
“Their compensation generally includes annual equity grants averaging around $300,000, with those in the top 1% receiving multimillion-dollar equity awards annually,” the report reads.
Their responsibilities have evolved and now include managing business risk, broader security issues like product security and physical security, IT security, and digital strategy.
Suddenly, that salary doesn’t seem so large when you consider the scope of their responsibilities and the career path required to reach this level.
The higher the salary, the more experience the CISOs tend to have. On average, CISOs working for $20B+ companies have 11 years of tenure.
“CISOs with long tenures – a group with higher representation in the $20B+ segment – typically have backgrounds in tech, because in security’s early days, when many of these CISOs embarked on their careers, compliance wasn’t a formal function yet. In contrast, the $1B- $2B segment has relatively more CISOs with shorter tenures who started their careers later in time and were able to follow a formal compliance career path,” the report reads.
It also noted that most CISOs are open to changing jobs in the next 12 months.
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