Communication With Stakeholders

You should communicate transparently, timely, and appropriately about security matters with all involved parties throughout security projects and build a collaborative security-aware relationship.

For you as a security specialist, this means: regularly sharing security findings with management and technical teams, answering security-related questions from colleagues, and explaining security risks and vulnerabilities to non-technical stakeholders. It's important to tailor security communications to different audiences - technical details for engineers, business impact for executives - and to combine active listening with clear, risk-appropriate security information.

By communicating effectively about security, you build trust while ensuring awareness. As a security specialist, you must also be able to convey security risks and vulnerabilities in a balanced way that creates appropriate urgency without causing panic, and manage expectations around security implementations.

Starting Points

• How to Communicate About Security Issues
• NIST Guide for Cybersecurity Event Recovery
• CISA Crisis Communications Handbook

Key Points

• Schedule regular contact moments with important stakeholders (e.g., weekly update or demo).
• Be transparent about progress, but also about problems: explain bottlenecks in time along with your approach plan, so no one is surprised.
• Actively listen to feedback or concerns from stakeholders and address them - show that you take their input seriously and incorporate it where possible in your advice.
• Maintain a professional relationship: i.e., politeness, keeping agreements, not reacting defensively to criticism, and building trust through honesty.