Every IT leader we talk to during Cybersecurity Awareness Month can point to a document. It has a title page, a revision date, a distribution list, and a set of steps to follow if ransomware hits. What most of them can't point to is the last time anyone ran through it. That gap is the difference between a plan and a defense. A plan is a claim until someone tests it An incident response (IR) plan describes what your organization believes it will do during a ransomware event: w

Ask a compliance leader what changed this year, and you’ll usually get a list of new requirements. That’s the wrong list to plan from. The more useful one is what moved. So far in 2026, four widely tracked compliance dates have moved, paused, or been repealed before taking effect. Not every one applies to your organization. The pattern behind them does, no matter which frameworks you’re tracking. The updated HIPAA Security Rule remains a proposed rule. HHS’s projected final a

The four models solve different problems. Here’s how higher ed audit leaders should think about the choice, and where each one wins. The pressure most higher ed internal audit shops are under The pattern is familiar to every higher ed audit leader: the risk universe is growing fast (cyber, AI, third-party, federal compliance), the audit plan reflects that, but the team is the same size it was five years ago. At some point each year, that math forces a choice: get bigger, get

Two questions follow every AI output your organization produces: who owns it, and what rights did you transfer to the vendor to create it? Most have answered neither. In our 2026 AI Governance Benchmark of five city governments and three universities, Intellectual Property (Domain 8 of the Securance 11) averaged 1.1 of a possible 9 points — and the higher education institutions in the group scored a flat zero. Composite AI governance maturity across all 11 domains averaged 11