As CISOs
step into executive roles, the scope of their responsibility has expanded along with the expectations placed on them. They’re expected to be more strategic while continuing to ensure their businesses are protected against the rising tide of cyberthreats that AI fuels increasingly.
While AI is also an asset to enterprise security teams, many CISOs are still doing this with tools they’ve been using for years. It’s a difficult position to be in, according to
Tejas Ranade, chief product officer at
TrustCloud.
“CISOs are being asked to do something fundamentally impossible with the tools at their disposal,” Ranade told MSSP Alert. “To be considered strategic to their organizations, they are expected to prove how they are contributing to growth, increasing resilience, and reducing costs. However, their teams are buried in manual work, managing workflows, conducting point-in-time checks, and proving things after the fact.”
There’s a “disconnect in these two realities,” he said, which helps lead to burnout and other stresses among CISOs.
TrustCloud launched an AI-native Security Assurance Platform for CISOs, an AI-fueled offering designed to integrate governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) and cybersecurity, enabling CISOs and security teams to better manage risk and ensure compliance by bringing automation to manual processes.
Too Many Manual Processes
Manual processes make it difficult for CISOs to feel confident about reporting the status of their security posture or the outcomes created by the security tools to company leaders and board members, according to TrustCloud executives. At the same time, they can’t keep pace with the rapidly evolving cyberthreat landscape, which is being remolded quickly thanks to AI and advanced digital technologies.
“TrustCloud’s AI platform is eliminating the gap, with AI that can reduce manual work, increase the assurance in security and GRC, and measure the business impact of every change,” Ranade said. “That’s allowing CISOs to shift from reactive, low-confidence, check-the-box activities to continuous assurance that’s tied to business outcomes.”
Leaning on AI to improve security capabilities highlights the dual nature of the technology in the field, where it is both a weapon that is getting heavy use by bad actors and a tool for fighting back against such threats. For CISOs, AI is also helping to
reshape their jobs, as outlined in a
report earlier this month by agentic AI platform maker
Seemplicity.
AI's Impact on CISOs
TrustCloud founder and CEO
Sravish Sridhar wrote about the importance of arming CISOs with AI capabilities and acknowledging the effect the technology is having on them.
“AI is forcing CISOs to step into a new kind of leadership role, one that blends security engineering, risk arbitration, and ethical stewardship,” Sridhar wrote. “It is no longer enough to block bad traffic and pass audits; you’re now shaping how your company thinks about data, autonomy, and accountability in systems that learn and change over time. That’s uncomfortable territory, but it is also a rare chance to redefine the value of security as an enabler of responsible innovation rather than a brake on progress.”
Better Information, Faster Results
TrustCloud’s platform pulls together data from cloud, business, and on-prem systems into one place, even at a very large scale. It connects continuous control monitoring with GRC goals, helping CISOs see where gaps exist, what they mean for the business, and where to focus spending and priorities.
In addition, it delivers a faster-time-to-value from GRC implementations and insights into the business impact of any changes.
An AI Tool for MSSPs
The platform gives MSSPs another tool as they work with clients to modernize their GRC and other security functions, according to Ranade. Many MSSPs are focused on managing security operations, from alerts to infrastructure, though their clients are demanding more accountability about risk and compliance.
“MSSPs are being pulled up the stack,” he said. “CISOs often talk about going beyond the ‘now what’ to the ‘so what.’ MSSPs have the opportunity of connecting real-time risk posture and compliance status to business objectives, and having a much higher-value conversation with CISOs around what to prioritize.”
It also means new service models, with MSSPs delivering continuous monitoring, managed services for third-party risk assessments, and audit readiness-as-a-service without scaling headcount linearly.”
Modernizing GRC
The AI-driven Security Assurance Platform is a key part of TrustCloud’s push to modernize GRC operations, a much needed shift given that many enterprise CISOs still are steeped in manual processes that can’t fundamentally change the way they work.
“The transformation has two drivers,” Ranade said. "First, CISOs are struggling to confidently report and share their security and risk posture under increasing regulatory, compliance, and customer expectations. Second, APIs and AI are creating an inflection point. Product and SaaS data is much more accessible via APIs, and AI models have matured to a point where they are able to automate a broad swath of GRC workflows.”
Change is coming, he said, but the industry is not very far down the road yet. He sees TrustCloud’s platform as an important step in that direction.
