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,