What should your next cyber board brief say?
Pick your entity class. Get a seven-slide board brief: the instruments that bind you, your reporting clocks, board-level tests and vendor AI — as PowerPoint.
Build your brief
Seven slides, set to your regulator, ready before the board papers go out. Pick your entity class and the slides below rebuild; every reference on them comes from the regulator’s own notification.
The slides are plain on purpose — Arial on white, no logo — so they drop into your own board template. The only mark on them is a footer line.
Take this away as an editable PowerPoint deck
Everything above is yours already. This is the version you can put in front of your team — the same result with your details on it, as plain slides you can edit and drop into your own board template. It opens here and lands in your inbox, so it is to hand when you actually need it rather than in a tab you closed.
Sit on a board yourself? Get the eight questions to ask your CISO →
Why the rating slide is blank
Three figures on slide 3 cannot come from an entity class: your external security rating, your industry’s average, and your ransomware likelihood as a multiple against companies rated 750 and above. They are specific to your domain.
Insurers, customers and supervisors can already see an outside-in rating of you. The board should see it first, and see it move. A number that changes between meetings is what turns a cyber update from an assurance into a measurement — the last of the board-level tests in the RBI governance check.
Where every line comes from
- Instruments and dates — the same register the regulation finder reads, so a correction lands in both at once.
- Reporting clocks — the incident reporting clock, shortest first.
- Board-level tests — Chapter II of the RBI Directions of 31 July 2026 for RBI classes; the structural tests IRDAI and SEBI set for theirs.
- The CDSL note — SEBI’s order of 20 July 2026, read in what the CDSL order says about the assets you forgot to list.
- Vendor AI — the agentic vendor AI readiness check.
Indicative, and not legal advice. Whether an instrument applies is a determination for your compliance and legal team. Every instrument cited here was verified against the issuing regulator's own notification on .
Questions this page answers
- What should a CISO put in a board cyber report in India?
- The instruments that bind the entity and their next dates, the incident reporting clocks with a named owner for each, an external measurement that moves between meetings, the board-level tests the regulator sets, and the decisions the board is being asked to take. A report of assurances alone — “no significant issues” — is weaker than it was: the 2026 RBI Directions make board review a recurring obligation, and periodic review implies a number the board can question.
- Why does the brief leave the rating slide blank?
- Because the three figures on it — the organisation’s external security rating, its industry’s average and its ransomware likelihood as a multiple against companies rated 750 and above — are specific to the organisation and cannot be computed from an entity class. They come from the complimentary Cyber Risk Rating Report, requested for the organisation’s own domain.
- Can we use our own board template?
- Yes, and that is why the slides are plain: Arial on white, no logo, a single footer line. Download the PowerPoint and paste the slides into the company’s own template, or print the page to PDF.
- Does the brief cover regulated entities outside RBI?
- Yes. SEBI regulated entities, insurers and intermediaries under IRDAI, GIFT City IFSC entities and ordinary body corporates each get the instruments, clocks and board-level tests that apply to them. Regional Rural Banks and Local Area Banks get a brief that says plainly that no member of the 2026 RBI cyber family binds them.