Source: [id: 41018; name: CSO; isActive: true; siteId: 3] -- CSO -- $content.altguid

Security Salaries 2003: Coming of Wage

The only clear trend when it comes to security salaries is that they're likely to rise as the function matures.

By Simone Kaplan

June 01, 2003 — CSO — There's no such thing as an industry standard when it comes to the executive security position—not for title, job scope, responsibility or reporting structure. And that goes double for compensation.

Security salaries are still shaking out as the executive-level security role comes into its own. Partly, that's because the story of the typical CSO is not a simple one. Just about every security officer out there is a variation on a theme. Likewise, there's no clear consensus on exactly what a CSO's worth is—certainly not among the recruiters nor even the CSOs themselves. "I'd say most make at least $100,000," says the chief of security for a large credit union. But the gap between that and the top end of the market for CSOs is wide. "Large companies hiring security executives can pay up to $500,000," says Marc Lewis, president for the North American division of Morgan Howard, a global technology executive recruiter. The disparity can be chalked up to the fact that no aspect of the CSO role itself is clearly defined.

As part of our annual compensation survey of more than 400 security executives, we asked CSOs to give us an idea of how much they make, what their jobs entail, what their professional titles are, how long they've been at their jobs and in what industries they work.

The results were not what we were expecting. Our respondents indicate that having a C-level title doesn't necessarily translate to a higher salary. In fact, most of the respondents at that level are making about the same in terms of total compensation, regardless of titlein other words, security managers earn basically what CSOs do. Compensated most highly are vice presidents or directors, but only 8 percent of them make more than $300,000 per year.

We may have been caught off-guard, but the lack of a connection between title and compensation was no surprise to CSOs we talked to. According to Marcia LaManna, corporate director of systems security for Lifetime Healthcare, title isn't the point. "I don't care much about title," LaManna says. "I'm the last word on security at my company. If I were at another company, I'd probably have the CISO or CSO title. But I don't think the C in the title matters in terms of salary."

Our survey also revealed that there were almost as many names for top security executives as there were companies queried. Well, maybe that's an exaggeration, but we discovered that a security manager at one company can be doing the same job as an executive vice president or a CSO at another. That's probably why, at least for now, compensation levels are predicated more on the scope of the CSO's job responsibilities than on title. And that's the way it should be, LaManna says. "The bottom line is accountability and responsibility." Basically, the more you're responsible for, the more you make. A security executive in charge of traditional and information security will command more than someone overseeing only infosecurity, and an executive at a 2,000-person company will make less than someone responsible for protecting 40,000 people.

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