Resilience Over Theater: Modernizing Cyber Governance
Preface
Let’s be honest. Most companies aren’t losing to genius hackers. They’re losing to their own complexity. You don’t need a zero-day when multi-cloud sprawl, leaky identities, and noisy tools leave the door open.
We confuse buying controls with having control. That gap is where companies bleed.
Here’s the truth I need you to hear. Cybersecurity is not an IT side quest. It’s a survival issue. When—not if—someone logs in with your keys, only three things matter:
How fast do you know?
How fast do you contain?
How fast do you recover?
If those answers aren’t measured in minutes or hours, you’re betting the business against people who plan in weeks and cash out in days.
This report skips the theater and goes straight to leverage. First, who’s attacking and why they’re winning. Next, the quiet killers in strong programs: blind spots, burnout, weak identity, brittle recovery. Finally, what to change now: unify operations to cut noise, protect identity like crown jewels, and drill recovery until it’s muscle memory.
The goal isn’t perfection. The goal is resilience. Make the next breach a footnote, not a headline.
Op-Ed: Resilience Over Theater
Let’s stop pretending everything is fine. It isn’t. Many programs look strong on slides and weak on contact. Dashboards glow. Risk doesn’t move.
We keep buying platforms. We don’t always reduce risk. Attackers aren’t magical. They’re patient and fast. They exploit the same old mistakes: complexity, sloppy identity, and plans that fail under pressure.
My thesis is simple. Complexity has outpaced control. Identity is the real battlefield. When bad things happen, recovery speed decides the story—not the logo count in your stack.
The Noise That Drowns the Signal
Walk into most SOCs and you’ll see it: thousands of alerts, dozens of dashboards, a tired team trying to keep up. That isn’t vigilance. It’s a design flaw. When everything pages, nothing matters.
The key question isn’t “How many alerts did we process?” It’s “Which detections led to real action this quarter?” And “Which ones just ate our time?”
Leaders make it worse by equating purchase with progress. Adding tools without removing noise is like fixing traffic by adding random stoplights.
Leadership fix:
Freeze new rules for 30 days.
Rank detections by time-to-clear and historical value.
Cull the bottom third.
Automate enrichment for the rest.
Track median triage time, alert acceptance rate, and time to contain. These numbers map to real risk.
The Front Door Is Identity — And It’s Open
Most attackers don’t “break in.” They log in. MFA fatigue. Token theft. Consent phishing. Unmanaged service accounts. Identity is both your perimeter and your backdoor.
Too many teams still treat identity like an HR directory. It’s not. It’s the business control plane.
If admins can elevate without just-in-time access, you’re exposed. If legacy protocols stay on “for one old app,” you’re exposed. If consent grants aren’t watched like wire transfers, you’re exposed.
Leadership fix:
Make admin access time-bound by default.
Kill legacy/basic auth. No exceptions.
Use phishing-resistant factors for privileged roles.
Watch consent grants, token anomalies, and dormant account reactivations like money leaving a vault.
Treat service principals like people: owners, reviews, expirations, rotations.
Recovery Is a Strategy, Not a Sticker
Prevention matters. It isn’t enough. Breaches will happen. The teams that survive have practiced.
I don’t mean tabletop theater that ends with “We should write a runbook.” I mean live-fire restores—from zero to a safe, tested transaction—with a stopwatch running.
Backups alone are not resilience. Resilience is write-once, off-path, tested often, and executable under pressure. If legal, PR, operations, and security haven’t rehearsed together, your worst day will also be your first day working as one team.
Leadership fix:
Quarterly tabletops for decisions.
Semiannual live restores for crown-jewel systems.
Set hard success criteria: time to safe order processing, data integrity checks, clean failback.
Pre-approve kill switches for identity, network segmentation, and mass secret rotation.
Fund this like insurance. Because it is.
Boards: Govern Outcomes, Not Purchases
The common board question is, “Do we have the right tools?” Wrong question.
Ask this instead:
What is our median time to contain identity-based incidents? Is it getting better?
When did we last restore a crown-jewel system from scratch? How long did it take?
Which detections actually created cases that mattered last quarter?
What’s our blast radius if our identity provider is compromised for one hour?
If your CISO can’t answer clearly, the issue isn’t technical. It’s governance. You would never accept “We bought a budgeting platform” as proof of financial control. Don’t accept “We bought an XDR” as proof of security control.
What Must Change — Now (No Acronyms, Just Actions)
Converge the view. Cut the noise.
Pull SIEM, XDR, and SOAR data into one picture. Delete or suppress anything that never drives action. Automate enrichment so analysts investigate, not copy-paste.Treat identity like crown jewels.
Just-in-time, time-boxed admin roles. Phishing-resistant factors for privileged access. Block legacy auth. Monitor consent, tokens, and dormant accounts with page-now severity.Drill recovery until it’s boring.
Immutable, isolated backups. Live-fire restores with business observers. Pre-approved kill switches and ready-to-send comms. Measure time to safe operation like a P&L number.Speak in business terms.
Translate detections into risk, cost, liability, and trust. Replace vanity metrics with MTTC, time-to-restore, and blast-radius reduction.
The Real Objection (and Why It Fails)
“This sounds expensive.” Compared to what? A week of downtime? A disclosure that hits your market cap? A lawsuit that exposes every sloppy decision? The bill always arrives. You pay in preparation or you pay in public.
The Mindset Shift
Security excellence isn’t doing more. It’s doing what matters. You won’t have perfect visibility everywhere. That’s fine. Build decisive visibility where it counts most.
Trade performative breadth for resilient depth. Fewer alerts. Better outcomes. Fewer exceptions. Clearer ownership. Fewer slides. More drills.
Cybersecurity in 2025 is a knife fight in the dark. You won’t rise to the occasion. You’ll fall to your preparation. Make that level high.
Call to Action
In the next 30 days, pick one lever—noise, identity, or recovery. Cut its risk by 50%. Pick a number. Move it. Show it to the board. Then do it again.
Resilience over theater. Every time.
