The Global CISO Landscape: A Leadership Gap Too Large To Ignore
Sophos, March 23,2026
Why the world needs scalable security leadership - and MSPs and MSSPs are key to delivery
The 2026 CISO Report, published by Cybersecurity Ventures in partnership with Sophos, highlights a critical imbalance in global cybersecurity leadership. Despite decades of progress and near-universal CISO adoption in Fortune 500 and Global 2000 organizations, there are still only 35,000 CISOs worldwide serving an estimated 359 million businesses.
As Sophos CEO Joe Levy notes in the report, that imbalance represents a 10,000:1 business-to-CISO ratio: 'Those are not good odds. This is a market failure. 'The cybersecurity ecosystem' hasn't figured out how to address this gap. We have the potential to do that now.'