Field CISO.

A vendor-side role — usually housed at a security platform vendor — that pairs senior CISO-grade experience with go-to-market work, advising customer CISOs, shaping product roadmaps, and presenting at industry events. It belongs to the Roles & Careers category of cybersecurity.

A vendor-side role — usually housed at a security platform vendor — that pairs senior CISO-grade experience with go-to-market work, advising customer CISOs, shaping product roadmaps, and presenting at industry events.

A 'Field CISO' is a vendor-side role that emerged in the late 2010s and proliferated through 2022–2025 as security platforms competed for executive trust. The Field CISO is typically a former enterprise CISO hired by a security vendor (CrowdStrike, Wiz, Palo Alto Networks, Zscaler, Cloudflare, SentinelOne, Okta, and many others) to engage with customer CISOs and CIOs in a way that pre-sales engineers cannot. Day-to-day work includes executive briefings with prospect and customer CISOs, framing the vendor's roadmap in security-strategy terms, contributing to product direction based on field observation, presenting at industry events (RSAC, Black Hat, Gartner Risk & Security), publishing thought-leadership content, and acting as an internal voice for what the field actually needs. Strong Field CISOs are credible practitioners — they tend to retain board advisory seats, vCISO arrangements, and IR experience — and not just marketing voices. The role is sometimes confused with 'vCISO' (a fractional internal CISO for a small organization), but a Field CISO works for the vendor; a vCISO works for the customer.

Defences for Field CISO typically combine technical controls and operational practices, as detailed in the full definition above.

Common alternative names include: Vendor Field CISO, Customer-facing CISO.