WHAT DOES AN INFORMATION SECURITY LEAD DO?
Published: Aug 29, 2025 - The Information Security Lead, owning the enterprise IT security environment, designs and implements robust security systems, and safeguards digital assets across all sites. This role involves identifying and addressing security gaps, monitoring for threats, managing incident response, and maintaining corporate security policies and disaster recovery measures. The Lead also drives continuous improvements in infrastructure, application, and end-user security while fostering company-wide awareness through training and proactive threat management.
A Review of Professional Skills and Functions for Information Security Lead
1. Information Security Lead Overview
- Compliance: Ensure compliance with ISO 27K for all areas within Technology Development.
- Standards Definition: Define internal standards for secure development and operation of products and services based on ISO 27K and customer expectations.
- Stakeholder Management: Act as the interface towards other security functions and stakeholders, representing the organization in key programs and initiatives.
- Team Coordination: Coordinate and prioritize activities within the Cybersecurity team.
- Risk Assessment: Identify and analyze security vulnerabilities and assess their risk in solutions.
- Collaboration: Collaborate with key stakeholders on remediation strategies and provide guidance.
- Incident Management: Accompany and supervise post-incident activities, including lessons learned, for systems and applications within the domain.
- Business Support: Support the business with regional customization of solutions while ensuring security.
- Pre-Sales Support: Support pre-sales discussions with customers around cybersecurity.
- Training Facilitation: Facilitate training in Information and Cybersecurity across Technology Development.
- Technology Awareness: Proactively keep up with the latest technologies as part of the role.
2. Information Security Lead Job Description
- Business Communication: Articulate the security perspective to the business and help them understand the potential impact and possible controls in business terms.
- Requirement Alignment: Communicate business knowledge and requirements to the Information Security organization to ensure security is aligned with business strategy and needs.
- Compliance Counseling: Counsel business units in understanding regulatory information security compliance requirements and help ensure compliance.
- Policy Representation: Represent the business unit in the development of policies and standards.
- Audit Management: Act as the primary point of contact for all IT internal audits.
- Audit Participation: Participate in scoping, deliverable requests, and collaborate with senior leadership to clear audit reports and ensure action plans are complete and effective.
- Accountability Oversight: Ensure IT owners are held accountable for their controls and understand their responsibilities regarding risk mitigation and remediation, as well as compliance with security policies and standards, to reduce liabilities.
- Risk Reporting: Understand and report on the overall information security risk posture of the business unit.
- Vulnerability Management: Provide an enterprise view of vulnerabilities and associated risks to both the business and information security.
- Process Improvement: Focus on process improvement to manage risk, proactively prevent problems, and identify opportunities for efficiencies and automation.
- Incident Investigation: Investigate security incidents for the business and work with Information Security teams to recommend and implement appropriate corrective actions.
3. Information Security Lead Functions
- Strategy Development: Shape, develop, and maintain the Cyber Security Strategy.
- Policy Management: Maintain and evolve the Information Security Policy and other supporting policies.
- Expertise and Oversight: Provide subject matter expertise, governance, and oversight to IT activities and initiatives.
- Governance Representation: Represent IT on the Governance, Risk, and Standards Committee on an ad-hoc basis.
- Risk Management: Identify and document key risks and controls.
- Security Reporting: Produce security-focused metrics and reporting.
- Vulnerability Assessment: Assess and prioritise vulnerability assessments.
- Incident Management: Own the cyber incident management process with active end-to-end involvement and leadership on cyber incidents as they occur.
- Operations Collaboration: Work closely with the Security Operations team.
- Regulatory Interpretation: Interpret regulatory requirements and translate them into objectives to support corporate and strategic direction.
- GDPR Compliance: Work cross-functionally to ensure GDPR compliance and manage data incidents and subject access requests.
- PCI-DSS Compliance: Maintain PCI-DSS compliance.
4. Information Security Lead Accountabilities
- Learning Strategy: Own and author the strategy for learning in the cyber behaviours space for the group, from the C-suite to all global teams.
- Training Delivery: Lead the delivery of learning material with a hands-on approach.
- Behavioural Initiatives: Create innovative behavioural initiatives to drive a culture where everyone takes personal ownership of cybersecurity and builds a cyber-resilient organisation.
- Awareness Development: Develop behavioural change awareness material to mitigate potential cyber threats, prevent breaches, and reduce business impact.
- Business Awareness: Increase business awareness by promoting understanding of the specific threat landscape and potential business impacts.
- Reporting: Report weekly KPI and KRI to leadership on the health of the environment.
- Stakeholder Engagement: Engage with InfoSecOps, the MSSP, staff, and leadership across the organisation.
- Communication: Communicate effectively to support all levels of management and staff, both technical and non-technical.
- Staff Support: Support management and staff directly.
- Threat Mitigation: Work closely with the InfoSec team to establish prevention, detection, and mitigation techniques.
- SOC Collaboration: Collaborate proactively with the MSSP in day-to-day SOC operations and SIEM oversight.
- Decision-Making: Make independent decisions in identifying analysis tracks for escalated events, assigning analysis tasks, and escalating decisions ranging from Tier I events to incident response-level remediations.
5. Information Security Lead Job Summary
- Program Direction: Follow the directions related to complex global security programs in the logical and physical security domain within portfolios and projects.
- Project Management: Manage contractor staff and projects related to developing business and technical security solutions with operational procedures to support security risk mitigation actions.
- Research and Analysis: Research and analyze new processes and technologies available in the security industry to facilitate alignment with corporate systems and strategies.
- Security Functions: Support or assist with multiple information and traditional security functions at the delegation of senior management, including compliance programming, crisis management, security architecture, computer security incident response, computer security monitoring, travel security, insider threat, investigative processes, and project management.
- Change Management: Act as a change agent for programs of ownership and create, develop, maintain, and track integrated initiatives for effective operations.
- Governance Development: Develop, manage, and deploy governance for training, communications, program channel delivery, and assessment for continual process improvement.
- Threat Mitigation: Identify and mitigate threats and vulnerabilities associated with compromising security issues.
- Situational Awareness: Maintain current situational awareness of global threats to the enterprise and personnel through critical risk assessment and security threat analysis.
- Risk Assessment: Complete risk assessments.
- Security Audits: Conduct internal and external security audits.
6. Information Security Lead Responsibilities
- Strategy Collaboration: Collaborate with the EAM Compliance Leader in developing and executing a strategy within relevant areas.
- Service Governance: Provide governance on the UAR service to ensure effective control and service execution.
- SOX Support: Support the ITGC SOX program by planning and executing workstreams and activities to ensure ITGC control effectiveness, including providing guidance and support to control owners.
- Control Engagement: Engage with application and control owners to ensure alignment and actions related to user access reviews, access management controls, and other ITGC SOX controls.
- Audit Support: Engage with audit teams and stakeholders to support audit activities within access management and relevant areas.
- Deficiency Identification: Proactively identify information security and control deficiencies or opportunities for improvement and facilitate the development of pragmatic solutions.
- Remediation Support: Support control and remediation owners in designing and developing sustainable remediation plans when deficiencies are identified.
- Issue Escalation: Provide an escalation path for service and compliance issues.
- Metrics and Reporting: Develop and provide regular metrics and reporting to stakeholders to demonstrate service and control performance and highlight areas for improvement.
- Service Improvement: Develop and implement improvements on relevant services, including team enhancements, to ensure compliance with security and regulatory requirements.
- Training and Communication: Communicate and train on EAM topics, including UARs and ITGC SOX, to different audiences to improve awareness and knowledge across the enterprise.
7. Information Security Lead Details
- Environment Ownership: Own the enterprise IT Security environment for all sites.
- System Design: Design, build, and implement enterprise-class security systems for a production environment.
- Architecture Review: Identify security design gaps in existing and proposed architectures and recommend changes or enhancements.
- Security Research: Research the best ways to secure the company-wide IT infrastructure.
- Threat Monitoring: Monitor software for external intrusions, attacks, and hacks.
- Security Measures: Create, oversee, and test security measures, such as access authentication and disaster recovery.
- Incident Response: Respond to cybersecurity incidents through remediation efforts, including the implementation of secure tools, solutions, and the development of incident response and recovery processes.
- Data Protection: Protect digital files and information systems against unauthorized access, modification, or destruction.
- Policy Management: Determine, adapt, and maintain corporate security procedures and policies.
- Training: Provide staff with security awareness training.
- Security Improvement: Continuously improve network file system security, application-level security, end-user security awareness, and perimeter security, including firewall, spam, and virus protection.
- Threat Awareness: Understand new and emerging threats, vulnerabilities, and exploits that can affect information resources' confidentiality, integrity, and availability.
- IDS/IPS Monitoring: Monitor and analyze the output from IDS and IPS devices, initiate remediation actions, and research further controls and countermeasures.
8. Information Security Lead Duties
- Strategy Contribution: Contribute to functional strategy development and prioritize the operational deliverables and activities of the team to support the delivery of overall business targets.
- Tactical Management: Manage the tactical plan and provide support to others to achieve positive results for the business in line with the strategy.
- Deliverable Oversight: Oversee and prioritize the planning, organization, direction, and tracking of all deliverables.
- Risk Identification: Contribute to information and cybersecurity risk identification and assessment processes.
- Standards Development: Contribute to the development of standards for the effective remediation of information and cybersecurity risk.
- Regulatory Monitoring: Contribute to the monitoring of regulatory developments for new and changing rules, guidance, and regulatory standards that impact company information and cybersecurity.
- Regulatory Evaluation: Evaluate the impact of regulatory changes and facilitate the development of appropriate responses.
- Compliance: Comply with best practices, regulatory and legal requirements, and company processes and policies.
- Project Compliance: Comply with IT project methodology, security, and data privacy protocols and procedures.
- Conflict Resolution: Uncover and resolve potential conflicts or disagreements about project priorities.
9. Information Security Lead Additional Details
- Audit Management: Ensure satisfactory internal audits and demonstrate continuous business improvement.
- Risk Escalation: Escalate information and cybersecurity compliance, and emerging risk issues to the CIO.
- Progress Monitoring: Monitor and review progress closely.
- Process Consistency: Apply processes and procedures consistently.
- Risk Dashboard: Ensure the IT risk dashboard fully reflects all identified risks.
- Information Quality: Maintain the quality of information on compliance and outsourced registers.
- Compliance Reporting: Submit compliance returns within deadlines.
- Audit Closure: Close audit MAP on time.
- Standards Adherence: Adhere to technical standards and SLAs.
- Risk Identification: Identify risks in a good time and establish action plans to deal with potential issues.
- Stakeholder Engagement: Deliver positive stakeholder feedback.
10. Information Security Lead Role Purpose
- Central Contact: Serve as the central point of contact for all Information Security matters.
- Team Leadership: Lead the team in providing security services to the organization to enable and empower all functions in maintaining and improving the collective security posture.
- Program Delivery: Refine and deliver the security program while ensuring close alignment with compliance and risk programs.
- Security Awareness: Promote a culture of security awareness through advocacy, training, and knowledge campaigns across the organization.
- Team Development: Manage the performance and effectiveness of the security team through active coaching and investment in skill development and career growth.
- Advisory Services: Provide advisory services to InfoSec management and business units when conducting quantitative risk assessments and implementing changes to processes, risks, and controls.
- Risk Mitigation: Advise InfoSec management on mitigating risks identified in InfoSec maturity assessments.
- Risk Partnership: Partner with 1st line risk management teams and liaise with 2nd and 3rd lines of defense, maintaining strong relationships and ensuring transparency of information systems and security programs.
- Control Enhancement: Support the enhancement of InfoSec risks and controls in alignment with CISO priorities.
- Directive Alignment: Assist in updating InfoSec Directives and ensure alignment with corporate policies and standards.
- Communication Strategy: Create and own the communications strategy for the digital security team, including stakeholders and channels.
- Communication Delivery: Provide tactical support and delivery for communications plans, including writing, editing, proofing, and planning for monthly all-employee townhalls, external communications, and the cyber behaviours team.