The art of making technical risk make sense to executives

Jay Miller, CISO at Paessler, explains how security leaders should translate technical risk into business-focused terms for executives and boards, emphasizing plain language, data-backed narratives, and transparency. He illustrates these principles with real examples—vulnerability disclosure with deadlines, a brief attacker access due to misconfiguration, and urgent hardening in an M&A context—to show how to present impact, actions taken, and remaining risks without technical jargon or blame.