IANS & Artico Search Release 2021 CISO Compensation Benchmark Study

BOSTON, December 3, 2021 (Newswire.com) - With the rise in visibility and prominence, due in part to macro factors such as the SolarWinds and Colonial Pipeline cyber breaches, the demand for CISO talent grew even stronger in 2021. This increase in demand has led to turbulent market conditions and CISOs' eagerness to understand their market value and how their compensation compares to that of their peers.

IANS Research and Artico Search commenced its second annual CISO Compensation and Budget survey in March 2021. Between March and August, they received survey responses from 458 CISOs from a diverse set of companies by size, geography, and industry. The majority of CISOs surveyed have their primary workplace in the U.S., of which 43% are in the Northeast, 24% are in the Southeast, 21% work in the Central region and 12% in the West. Seven percent of respondents work in Canada.

In an increasingly competitive market - one in which saw a year-on-year increase in overall compensation for CISOs - the study provides visibility into compensation based on industry, location and company size.

Steve Martano, a partner in Artico Search's cyber practice, added, "Combining our executive recruiters' many years of security hiring and relationship-building with IANS' depth in research, data, and analytics, we are able to generate real-time data for the security function. With so much misinformation available, we went straight to the sources for accurate and timely security function compensation and budget data, which enabled us to extract interesting trends and comparative analysis across sectors."

"What matters to the CISO matters to IANS. Our clients constantly tell us that the ability to benchmark against peers is critical," said Nick Kakolowski, Senior Research Director of IANS. "We're thrilled to deliver this research - it was especially interesting to learn that female CISOs earn 7% more than male CISOs. We still have a ton of work to do to build a more gender-inclusive industry - just 45 of our respondents identified as female - but it's great to see progress on the compensation side."

This is the first publication in a series of four reports IANS and Artico have planned for release, covering CISO compensation, security budgets, CISO job satisfaction and key security staff compensation.

Download the 2021 CISO Compensation Benchmark Study

Source: IANS