Simone Petrella, the newest member of the FAIR Institute Advisory Board, comes from a key partner of the Institute, CyberVista, the leading cybersecurity education and workforce development company, particularly known for its board of directors education work. CyberVista has aligned the curriculum of its popular Resolve cybersecurity training with FAIR, and is working with the Institute on other education projects.
Podcast: Hear Simone Petrella's talk with FAIR Institute Director of Memberships and Programs, Luke Bader. Listen to the podcast below.
CyberVista CEO Simone Petrella has had a 15-year career in cybersecurity, starting in the Department of Defense and continuing in the defense contractor space supporting the intelligence community. Later, she moved into the private sector in retailing and financial services. Four years ago, she become one of the original founders of CyberVista.
Simone and other executives from CyberVista first learned about FAIR in 2015 from a chance meeting with Institute President Nick Sanna. They had just started their board and executive training program and were looking for a way to incorporate cyber risk into the curriculum. “We were extremely excited [about FAIR] and started the partnership and relationship from there.”
Incorporating FAIR into the CyberVista curriculum “has been extremely valuable to us as an organization. It allows us to work with clients and give them something tangible as a utility, a tool and a framework to oversee and manage their cyber risk, as opposed to talking about it in a more conceptual or theoretical way.
“That’s something that most of our senior business leaders, whether they are a CISO or any other part of the C-suite, or a risk manager, are familiar with - quantifying risk into dollars and cents — but have struggled to do it in the cybersecurity domain.”
Simone sees a huge opportunity in training cybersecurity and risk professionals to advance FAIR usage and cyber risk awareness as “not just adopting a framework and putting it on a shelf but really adopting it into the culture of the company.”
And that, she says, ties into the overall skills crisis in cybersecurity today. “We have lots of great tools and technology being developed on a routine basis but the one thing that we are still challenged with is the skills gap in the people that ultimately need to be responsible…
“We spend a lot of time trying to evaluate the risk of controls but from my perspective there is a huge quantifiable risk around having an unfilled position or an under-performing workforce.”
Podcast: Hear Simone Petrella's talk with FAIR Institute Director of Memberships and Programs, Luke Bader.
