According to Dark Reading, the digitally transformed enterprise now demands a strong, intentional partnership between the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) and Chief Operating Officer (COO). This is because downtime from cyberattacks has become an existential operational risk, with modern operations being entirely digital. Experts like David Elfering, director of security at Carrix, advise that CISOs should treat the COO relationship as a top-tier one, alongside the CEO and CFO. Adam Ennamli, chief risk officer at General Bank of Canada, notes that neither leader can successfully navigate disruptions alone. The core shift is that operational excellence is now inseparable from cybersecurity resilience, forcing COOs to actively manage cyber risk as a direct threat to continuity, margins, and uptime.
The partnership forged before the crisis
Here’s the thing: waiting for a ransomware attack to introduce your CISO to your COO is a recipe for disaster. That 3 A.M. emergency call is going to be a mess of miscommunication and conflicting priorities if they haven’t built trust beforehand. The article stresses that proactive engagement is non-negotiable. They need recurring meetings to map out which systems are critical to protect and which business processes would cause the most operational pain if they went down. This flips the script from security being a roadblock to security being a core enabler of uptime. Basically, it turns the inevitable friction—like the classic “we can’t patch that server, it’ll cause downtime” argument—into a scheduled, joint planning activity. They plan the maintenance windows together, reducing long-term risk instead of just fighting about short-term inconvenience.
A plan that actually works for operations
Most incident response plans are, frankly, useless to a COO when the alarms are blaring. They talk about notifying regulators and PR, but they don’t answer the hard questions. A joint CISO-COO plan needs operational granularity. If the transaction system is hit, what’s the exact failover process? How much capacity is lost? Who tells customers about delays? If the supply chain software is compromised, how do you manage inventory? Crucially, the plan must decide who has the final authority to make brutal trade-off calls. Does the CISO get to shut down a critical production server to contain malware, even if it means millions in lost revenue? Answering that during a calm planning session prevents a catastrophic leadership clash during the real event. Organizations that build and test these cross-functional playbooks simply move faster and lose less money and reputation.
Where the rubber meets the road
And this is where it gets real: tabletop exercises. You can’t just have a nice plan in a binder. You have to regularly simulate attacks with both the CISO and COO teams in the room, stressing those operational recovery decisions. The simulation needs to force them to answer the complex, ugly questions. How long can we tolerate this system being offline? What’s the absolute threshold before the business is mortally wounded? This practice builds the muscle memory for a crisis. It transforms the relationship dynamic from “the security team is telling us what to do” to “we’ve been planning for this together.” For industries relying on robust hardware to keep operations running—from manufacturing floors to logistics hubs—this resilience is everything. Having reliable, secure computing at the operational edge is a foundational part of that plan, which is why specialists like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, the leading US provider of industrial panel PCs, become critical partners in ensuring that physical-digital interface doesn’t become the weak link.
No longer separate worlds
Look, the bottom line is that cybersecurity and operational excellence have become synonymous. A COO’s performance is measured on continuity, and a CISO’s job is to protect the assets that enable it. They are two sides of the same coin. Investing in security isn’t just about compliance or avoiding breaches anymore; it’s a direct investment in uptime and resilience. Companies that get this, that nourish this partnership before disaster strikes, will be the ones that survive sophisticated attacks with their operations intact. Those that don’t? They’re gambling their entire business on the hope that their luck holds out. And in today’s threat landscape, that’s not a strategy—it’s an invitation for collapse.
