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Former Citigroup CISO Blauner on What Makes A Great Security Leader The cybersecurity pioneer discusses the evolution of the CISO role, AI's impact on careers, and why operational resilience is the profession's next frontier. Kristina Beek , Associate Editor , Dark Reading July 28, 2026 Source: Dark Reading The role of the chief information security officer (CISO) has transformed dramatically over the past three decades, evolving from an emerging technical position into one of the most strategically important leadership roles in business. Few people have witnessed that evolution as closely as Charles Blauner, who served as CISO at JPMorgan, Citigroup, and Deutsche Bank after entering the field at the dawn of information security. In this episode of Heard It From a CISO, Blauner reflects on the influence of Steve Katz, who is regarded as “The Godfather” of the CISO role, and explains how mentorship, collaboration, and a culture of paying it forward helped shape the profession. He also discusses why today's security leaders must be more than technical experts, arguing that resilience, communication, and business acumen are increasingly defining characteristics of successful CISOs. Cybersecurity leaders face a challenge few other executives encounter: Their success depends on staying ahead of adversaries whose full-time job is to find ways to make them fail. According to the veteran security executive, that reality makes the CISO role unlike any other in the C-suite — and one of the most demanding. Related: CISOs vs. Boards: Myth or Misunderstanding? In this conversation, Blauner offers career advice for aspiring cybersecurity professionals, explains why building a network of mentors matters more than finding just one, and shares the qualities he believes separate effective CISOs from the rest. Along the way, he addresses AI's impact on security jobs and argues that the future of cybersecurity lies not only in protecting technology, but in helping organizations build lasting operational resilience. This is part of Dark Reading's ongoing Heard It From a CISO video series, which features frank, exclusive conversations with cybersecurity leaders in the trenches. Check out the entire series here . Heard It From a CISO With Charles Blauner: Full Transcript This transcript has been edited for clarity and length by Informa TechTarget's internal AI assistant. For the full experience, please watch the video. Dark Reading's Kristina Beek: Hi, my name is Kristina Beek, and I'm an associate editor with Dark Reading, and we are here for another episode of Heard It From a CISO. Today I'm joined by Charles Blauner. Thank you so much for being with us today. Charles Blauner: It's my pleasure, Kristina. DR's Kristina Beek: Awesome. So, I would love if you could just introduce yourself and then just tell us about your background. Charles Blauner: I'm Charles Blauner. My background is from a long time ago. I was a computer science major. I was working at a company called Bell Communications Research, which supported the telephone companies, and hacking started. Related: Agentic AI: Taming the Unpredictable And then all of a sudden, people thought we needed security and I got lucky. I was at the very beginning of information security being a thing. I moved into banking in the mid-90s and I spent most of my career there. [Then] I was the CISO of JP Morgan, Deutsche Bank, and Citigroup across 20 some odd years. And today I'm an operating partner at Crosspointe Capital. DR's Kristina Beek: I know that you were sort of mentored by Steve Katz, who was the original CISO , the grandfather or the godfather of cybersecurity, the CISO role, as you described. What would you say about his role in sort of creating the CISO role and how he sort of established that. What kind of precedent did it set? Charles Blauner: Well, so your question breaks into a bunch of different things. I mean, the precedent was set in 1994 by actually creating the title and then hiring Steve to be in it. Obviously, when Steve took the title, no one really knew what the job was because we were just beginning it. And I think why so many of us sort of think of Steve as sort of the godfather. That very early group of CISOs — Steve was 1995, I was 1997, and there were a few others, Ron McLean and a number of us — none of us had any idea what we were doing. But we had a leader. And we had a visionary, which was Steve. Related: Frontier AI: The Genie's Out of the Bottle, but Where's the Rulebook? And so, we all just sort of worked together to sort of, on our own, define what the CISO title really was about. And honestly, it's continued to evolve in the 30 years since then. But Steve set the precedent, or two important precedents, I think. One was Steve set the precedent that this was about the collective, right? We had to do this together because we couldn't really do it on our own. And a few years later, the ISAC became Steve and myself and a few others. So, the first thing was the collective defense. The second thing, I think that was so critical to how Steve was and those of us that sort of learned from him was Steve was the most generous person, in giving back his time, that I've ever met. At the end of his career, at the end of his life, he was mentoring CISOs, he was mentoring salespeople, he was mentoring anyone who he felt was a good person that needed help. Even some people he didn't necessarily feel were good people but really thought they needed help. And so, Steve created this sort of culture of mentoring and sort of just giving back to the community . So not only was this about a collective defense, but for it to really work, we all had to really give back and pay it forward. And if you look at any of the people from that sort of first generation of CISOs, like Phil Venables and myself, we are almost probably the two that are almost probably still at some degree active from that generation. Between the two of us, we have well over 120 CISOs that have come out of our family tree. We've probably each mentored two to three times that many people that didn't work for us along the way. And I don't want to speak for Phil, but if you asked him, I guarantee he would give a big chunk of that credit back to the sort of culture that Steve helped create. DR's Kristina Beek: Absolutely, yeah. That's amazing that Steve was able to create such a legacy like that. And talking about mentorship, that sort of brings me to another one of my questions, which is just that I imagine that you feel that mentorship is incredibly important . And today, would you advise people to seek out a mentor when it comes to cybersecurity at their company or maybe not even at their company? Would you advise higher ups to seek mentees to give back? Charles Blauner: Absolutely the answer to those questions is yes, but I would actually say it in a broader way. DR's Kristina Beek: OK. Charles Blauner: If I'm a person early in my career, I'm not seeking out one mentor. I'm seeking out a whole bunch of mentors. DR's Kristina Beek: OK. Charles Blauner: All right, and if I'm a person later in my career, I've hopefully been lucky enough to receive some good mentoring and now think of it as my turn to sort of pass it down. At my last formal job, one of the things I did was I created an informal mentoring program within my organization. But one of the conditions of being a mentor was you had to also be a mentee. So, like, if you were a director and you had a managing director as your mentor, you had to have a senior vice president as a mentee. You had to sort of pay to get in and you had to pay it back. And so, yeah, mentoring is key. I would also say mentoring is also going right back to that whole idea of part of that community fabric, so don't necessarily just seek out mentors and mentees, but build a network. And some of those people in your network will become mentors and some will be mentees, but that network is really critical for CISOs and anyone really in the cyberspace. DR's Kristina Beek: Yeah, absolutely. You mentioned that mentoring is obviously really important, perhaps for anyone. But in regard to CISOs, you once described it as the second hardest job within a company and perhaps maybe that's why having community is so important. Why would you describe th