29% of CISOs say they receive adequate budget to accomplish their goals, compared to 41% of board members who think the function has enough funds.

Despite the increase in budgets and the perception of adequate resources, nearly half of UK cybersecurity leaders, 47%, struggle to engage at the board level.

CISOs with healthy board relationships report stronger partnerships with IT operations (82% versus 69% of other CISOs) and engineering (74% versus 63% of other CISOs).

When asked what skills CISOs should develop, the biggest gaps in importance include business acumen (55% for boards versus 40% for CISOs), emotional intelligence (45% for boards versus 35% for CISOs) and communication (52% for boards versus 47% for CISOs).

For boards with a CISO member, 60% report excellent or very good working relationships when communicating progress against milestones, security goal achievement and plan of record, compared to 16% for boards without a CISO member.

51% of CISOs see upskilling or reskilling security employees as a priority, versus 27% of boards.

36% of CISOs consider contributing to revenue growth initiatives a priority compared to 24% of board members.

46% of CISOs said attaining security milestones was indicative of their success, compared to only 19% of board respondents.

83% of security leaders participate in board meetings "somewhat often" or "most of the time".

CISOs with good board relationships are more likely to be given the ability to pursue use cases for generative AI, such as creating threat detection rules (43% versus 31% of other CISOs), analyzing data sources (45% versus 28% of other CISOs), incident response and forensic investigations (42% versus 29% of other CISOs), and proactive threat hunting (46% versus 28% of other CISOs).

57% of CISOs prioritize regulation and compliance knowledge, compared to 44% of board members.