10. You have to ask everybody in the organization -- all umpteen thousand of them -- to buy into your ideas
9. The opportunity to be tied in a leather bag with ravenous, rabid ocelots caught your eye on Monster.com
8. Your sincere hope that the reptilian extraterrestrial tyrants who clandestinely own and operate IT would reveal themselves during your tenure does not manifest itself.
7. Seeing as this situation was unlikely to change without getting a full frontal lobotomy, you are forced to tender your resignation.
6. Guantanamo has an opening
5. The imminent dissolution of civilization, followed by a period of universal suffering and despotic rule by sociopathic passive-aggressives over feudal minions who spend their short, brutal lives tending servers in a fire-scarred data center forces you to move on.
4. You decide to become a professional pirate. It has always been a dream of yours to live the life of a swashbuckling corsair, beholden to none and master of all you survey - Rrrrr
3. You decide to get involved in the flinging of porcupines between ocean going cargo ships and the shore as your new career path.
2. A position of junior goat herder in Mongolia was too much to turn down.
1. You have a chance to star in the remake of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension as John YaYa.
If this weren't so funny, I'd say you were being cynical! I haven't looked at monster.com in a while, perhaps I should catch up. Thanks for the levity...I'm a CISO and I need it!
I love # 4. I want to make em walk the plank!
Allocute first
I would add that the shareholders become the raging towns people and you are Franksteins monster after a data breach and the stock loses 10% of its value....
Very funny indeed. My favorite is #10 --- even though I would have written it slightly differently:
You have been trying to tell everyone in the organization - all upteen thousand of them --- that data breaches just aren't an IT standard and definitely not a security policy. You want to get out before "they" sell you "their" ideas about security.
Very funny list--I especially like #9. But this might actually be a list of the top 10 reasons someone needs a vacation!
Sarah Scalet
It is good to know there are real CISO's out there. I started reading this just after reading a demand by development that they have permanent Read, Write, Alter and Delete authority over production data. It seems there was an application design problem that they didn't have time to fix.
It is both refreshing and disheartening to read this thread.
Those of us in this position are a unique breed. We keep doing the work because we believe in it, even though we're the only ones in the orginazation. The "authority granters" really aren't granting us any authority when they override and/or don't support our "authority" regularly.
The #1 one reason I would put on the original list:
"You stop trying to doing your job effectively because you have no support, are sick of fighting for traction, and are unwilling to go it alone anymore."
I truly believe that one day we will get beyond this level of immaturity within organizations and get the proper seat at the table we require.
Some companies are there; some are moving there; most (I believe) will never get there. Should you resign in 2008, search hard for the company that is either already there (most security professionals won't leave therefore the slots probably are not open anyway) or one that is enroute.
They are out there ...