HBC Digital Academy
Cybersecurity Governance for Leaders
A one-day executive program for leaders who are accountable for cyber risk, resilience and major technology decisions, without requiring them to become security engineers.
- Format
- 1 day
- Audience
- Boards + executives
- Style
- Governance + scenarios
- Delivery
- Private cohort
Purpose
Purpose
Give leaders a practical framework for governing cybersecurity as an institutional risk: what leadership owns, what must be delegated, what evidence should be demanded, and how decisions should be made before, during and after a major incident.
No packet captures, firewall syntax or penetration-testing theatrics. The focus is executive risk, governance, resilience, accountability and decision-making.
Who should attend
- Board members, CEOs and executive leadership teams
- Ministers, deputy ministers and senior public officials
- CIOs, CTOs, CISOs and risk leaders
- Audit, legal, compliance and governance leaders
- Executives responsible for critical services or infrastructure
- Leaders overseeing major vendors, cloud or digital platforms
What participants should leave with
| Outcome | Practical result |
|---|---|
| Executive cyber literacy | Understand the threat and control landscape at decision-making level. |
| Risk ownership clarity | Know which cyber risks belong to leadership and which are operational. |
| Governance framework | Understand roles, reporting, escalation and accountability. |
| Resilience perspective | Shift from 'prevent everything' to prepare, withstand, respond and recover. |
| Incident leadership | Know the decisions leaders face during a serious cyber event. |
| Vendor challenge capability | Ask better questions about third-party, cloud and supply-chain risk. |
| 90-day action agenda | Identify immediate governance and resilience priorities. |
Agenda
Cybersecurity as leadership discipline.
| Module | Time | Focus |
|---|---|---|
| Cyber risk without the noise | 09:00–09:30 | Threat reality, business impact and the executive role. |
| What leadership owns | 09:30–10:30 | Risk appetite, accountability, critical services and decision rights. |
| Governance that works | 10:45–11:45 | Board oversight, reporting, policies, metrics and escalation. |
| Resilience over illusion | 11:45–12:30 | Prevention, detection, response, recovery and continuity. |
| Third-party & cloud risk | 13:30–14:30 | Vendors, concentration, contracts, data, dependency and assurance. |
| Executive incident decisions | 14:30–15:15 | Crisis governance, communications, legal/regulatory and service priorities. |
| Cyber crisis tabletop | 15:30–16:15 | Leadership decisions under pressure using a realistic scenario. |
| 90-day governance agenda | 16:15–17:00 | Priorities, owners, evidence and next actions. |
Core frameworks
Risk ownership
Who accepts, mitigates or escalates risk
Critical services
What must keep operating and recover first
Governance chain
Board → executive → security → operations
Resilience cycle
Prepare, protect, detect, respond, recover
Third-party test
Dependency, access, assurance and exit
Executive evidence
Metrics that support decisions, not dashboards
Applied exercise
The executive scenario
Participants face a simulated ransomware or major service-disruption event. New information arrives in stages. Leaders must decide what to protect, what to shut down, who has authority, what evidence is trustworthy, how to communicate, and when recovery can safely begin.
Questions leaders should be able to answer
- Which services are mission-critical, and what recovery time is actually acceptable?
- Who can accept cyber risk on behalf of the organization?
- What evidence tells us our controls work rather than merely exist?
- Which vendors or platforms create concentration or systemic dependency?
- What decisions cannot wait until an incident happens?
- How will leadership know whether resilience is improving?
Customization options
- Government / critical-public-services edition
- Board and CEO cyber-risk oversight edition
- Financial-services / regulated-sector scenario
- Third-party and cloud concentration-risk deep dive
- Executive ransomware / major-outage tabletop
- Follow-on governance diagnostic or resilience review
A mature cyber program is not measured by how many controls it buys. It is measured by whether leadership understands the risks, makes explicit decisions, and can keep critical services functioning when controls fail.
Design a program around your institution.
We can start with a flagship program or design a private Academy pathway around your leadership priorities, teams, maturity level and transformation agenda.