Pick a critical system in your environment. Now ask yourself: how many accounts have administrative access to it? How many of those were provisioned in the last 90 days? How many belong to people who no longer work with your organization? How many belong to automated processes whose original purpose no one could explain from memory? If you can answer these questions quickly and confidently, you’re ahead of most organizations. If you can’t, you’re in good company — with real r

By Gillian Tedeschi, Vice President, Securance Consulting. Gillian drives Securance's go-to-market strategy for BEAD cybersecurity technical assistance, working with state broadband offices and subgrantees across the country to connect them with the compliance support they need. If you have received a Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) grant award, you are likely focused on what comes next: finalizing your network design, securing equipment, coordinating with you

Cyberattacks arrive without warning, escalate within hours, and demand a kind of leadership most executives have never been trained for. When an incident strikes, the decisions that define outcomes aren't made by the technical team alone — and the organizations that weather crises best are the ones whose executive leaders were already prepared."

The average CISO salary in the United States now exceeds $300,000, and that's before benefits, bonuses, and equity. For many small and midsized businesses (SMBs) already stretched across IT and compliance priorities, a full-time executive hire is simply out of reach. But the absence of senior security leadership carries its own price tag. Without someone setting direction, organizations make reactive decisions and are underprepared when an auditor or incident arrives. The que

Proactive security prevents damage; reactive security can only manage it. A purely reactive cybersecurity model centers on cleanup after an incident has already occurred. By waiting for a breach to trigger a response, organizations effectively hand the initiative to attackers, driving up recovery costs and unnecessarily destabilizing operations. When teams mobilize only after a breach becomes visible, the damage is already underway. Attackers have had time to move laterally,

This infographic highlights how a vCISO serves as a strategic security partner by delivering three core services.

Executive security reports often highlight resolved vulnerabilities and closed audit findings. While these reports suggest risk has been reduced, this conclusion can be misleading. In an environment where threats evolve faster than reporting cycles, a clean report may reflect documented activity rather than verified performance under real-world conditions. Many security reports confirm that remediation activities were completed. Far fewer validate whether administrative, tech

During a board discussion on a multimillion-dollar security investment, the CEO posed a simple question: “After we buy this new software, will we be safe?” The technology under consideration was solid. However, the reality is that the organization’s greatest cybersecurity risk—and its greatest untapped defense—was already on the payroll. The effectiveness of any security control, whether technical, administrative, or physical, ultimately depends on how people interact with it

For many organizations, the annual cybersecurity assessment serves as a foundational practice. It provides a critical snapshot of control effectiveness, regulatory alignment, and immediate risk exposure. However, treating this snapshot as a finish line rather than a starting point limits its long-term value. An annual assessment is a point-in-time validation. In an environment where technology stacks, identities, and threat techniques evolve continuously, resilience depends o