Cybersecurity lands on the CFO’s desk
Cybersecurity lands on the CFO’s desk
Publish Date: 2026-07-04 12:04:00
Source Domain: www.manilatimes.net
FOR YEARS, when a cybersecurity question reached the chief financial officer (CFO), the answer was simple: talk to the IT department. That answer is gone. Sunil Golecha, finance chief for Japan and Asia-Pacific at Palo Alto Networks, says nearly every CFO he now meets ranks cybersecurity among the top three issues they bring to the board. It is the shift Bernadette Nacario, the company’s country manager for the Philippines, raised at a recent media briefing. Cybersecurity used to be viewed as a technical cost, she said. Now it sits with the board and the C-suite because a breach affects revenue, customer trust, business continuity and enterprise value.
That framing is no longer just a vendor’s pitch. On June 22, the cybersecurity agencies of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States — the group often called the Five Eyes — issued a joint statement warning that frontier artificial intelligence (AI), the most advanced models of their kind, will reshape both attack and defense within months. Their language was blunt. Cyber risk “can no longer be treated as a purely technical issue,” they wrote. “This is a core business risk and leadership responsibility.” The wording closely echoes Nacario’s point, but this time it came from governments rather than a security company.
There is already a clock on it. Philippa “Pip” Cogswell, managing partner for Unit 42 in Japan and Asia-Pacific, the threat intelligence arm of Palo Alto Networks, says the fastest intrusions now move from initial compromise to data exfiltration — the point at which stolen data leaves the network — in about 72 minutes. That is faster than most companies can respond, which is why cybersecurity can no longer remain below board level.
So what changes when the CFO joins the conversation? Golecha says the questions come quickly. How do I measure the return on security investment? And how do I tell the…
