Why?

We are a group of driven and ambitious professionals who strive to achieve the ideal.

We have built and participated in C-level communities in a variety of industries, including Oil & Gas, Mining, Power & Enterprise IT, Information and Cyber Security, and across many divisions.

The Alliances Community’s basic ideals were born along with Alliance Media Group, as defined by the Collins dictionary: “A union formed for mutual benefit.” Everyone must believe in their own ability to succeed and improve. This can only be accomplished via selflessness in sharing and genuine feedback from everyone to whom we devote our time.

We no longer consider this industry to be B2B, but rather P2P. (Peer to Peer). Our intentions are to create a trusted platform for executives tackling similar business objectives to leverage their collective experience to support one another, debate opinions candidly for industry progression and professional growth, and benchmark strategies against one another, which we have been doing since August 2016. This is the community for CISO Alliances. The community built it for the community.

While understanding that in order to be sustainable in the modern world, every business will need to drive commercials. We believe that commercials should not be the driving force, but rather a solution to a ‘why’.

Our Chapters and community are working to make an impact on the Events Managed Services industry, which continues to act as if money is the most important factor and not the value of time. The industry was founded on the premise that “everyone wants to learn,” and we established the Alliances to ensure that end-user-driven meetings are solely focused on the educational needs of everyone involved as well as their business objectives. Focusing on the best practises for overcoming the common business objectives that motivate activity within each end user firm, rather than just global trends and themes to generate revenue.

Due to the Coronavirus pandemic, the digital environment has been forced to accommodate a remote workforce with limited human interaction since March 2020. As a result, our community representative has been open to digital chapters in addition to physical chapters when they return in Q3 2022. This complements our efforts in community building and makes the community feel like they are part of a continuous effort to meet their educational needs.

The Role of Every CISO Alliances Member

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Alliance - A union formed for mutual benefit

  • Pose challenges for community input – learn quickly that you are not alone

  • Prompt the Sydney CISO Alliances Content Board on topics to build content for upcoming Alliances Chapters and adhoc meetings

  • Repeat the above - Keep controlling this – it is for you after all!

  • Propose and demand what you want from this. Not limited to content or anything suggested so far, if it is justifiable for mutual benefit, let’s get it on.

  • Attend chapters that you can gain as well as share your experience, this is as much about giving back as it is about developing the industry

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Interview with Saleshni Sharma

  • With so many events and apparent community led gatherings, it has to beg the question, are others looking for the?

I believe so. Yes, there are many information security media and membership-based groups but we need a forum where the Cyber leaders who know the members through network, could get together and solve the concerns they may have from emerging risks and increasing regulatory requirements. We all are trying to build things on our own, sometimes getting together and building something, reusing it would be so much easier.

  • What were you looking for when you found alliances.global?

I was looking for a group which is not driven by vendor funding. An independent group where like-minded people join to collaborate, learn from each other’s experience and support each other when and where it is needed.

  • Are your expectations achievable?

Yes, however it may not be an easy task. It requires a group of networks to come together, open up about how the group supports each other and potentially how we can leverage the global support. Without vendor engagements and any joining fees, it will be an interesting challenge.

  • Why would info/ cyber sec professionals join a community led initiative like this?

It all depends on how the is marketed. If people see value, they will join. We all want to talk to someone we can count on, trust, people who have sufficient experience. We have so many questions, things to implement, regulatory requirements to adhere to. Infosec does not have a huge budget to hire unicorns. Companies try to hire one and then they have no one to bounce ideas to, work extended hours and feel unappreciated.  Also security is often not sufficiently budgeted. Some of us have worked in Start-up to Fortune 500 companies. There are so many tools which suit everyone’s budget. People will only learn quicker if they collaborate alternatively they could do Proof of Concept (POC) and spend months learning the same thing.  The forum will provide the support needed by the industry.

Security professionals are pretty hard to reveal a lot of information so the format of conversation should remain general. Example anonymous questions to be discussed so that company name and projects are not revealed etc. I can list 100’s of reasons why one may not join, that is how we are.

  • We have several formats for engagement and outcomes from them, they are listed below, would you add anything?
    • Open Forum – Suitable for when a business objective is raised by a community member and contextualised for feedback, debate and benchmarking against their peers on ways of overcoming that objective
    • Panel – Suitable for when the objective is relayed from 2 or more differing perspectives and the community input their own experiences and learnings
    • Workshop – Suitable when the ‘How to’ overcome a business objective can be drawn up as a guide/ workflow or Standard Operating Procedure by the community and influencers

We could start with what alliances.global offers today however it will be great to introduce Mentoring and Coaching at a later stage. There are so many talents and with the right mentoring and coaching we could develop more cyber leaders.

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