CFO stands for Chief Financial Officer, the executive responsible for financial planning, budgeting, forecasting, and capital allocation. In a company, the CFO turns business goals into spending decisions and measures the financial impact of risk, growth, and disruption.
In cyber security, the CFO matters because attacks are not only technical events; they are financial events. A ransomware outage can affect revenue, cash flow, insurance claims, recovery costs, and regulatory exposure. CFOs help decide how much to invest in controls, backups, resilience, and incident response, and they work with CISOs to translate threats into business terms. Good collaboration helps organizations avoid underfunding security, estimate loss realistically, and choose responses that protect both operations and finances.