Cybersecurity has a buzzword addiction, and I'm starting to wonder how much actual strategy is hiding behind…
James W. — Decision Intelligence Executive
Cybersecurity has a buzzword addiction, and I'm starting to wonder how much actual strategy is hiding behind all that vocabulary. We talk about innovation, agility, transformation, and becoming intelligence-led, but none of those things mean much to a business that's losing revenue during an outage, spending millions defending the wrong assets, or discovering that its most critical operational dependencies were never part of the risk conversation.
There's a considerable difference between telling executives that CTI is improving organizational resilience and demonstrating that intelligence helped prevent a costly disruption, redirected investment toward a credible threat, eliminated unnecessary spending, or protected a business capability that actually generates revenue. One sounds good in a board presentation, while the other changes how the organization allocates capital, manages risk, and operates.
That's the distinction I think we need to get considerably more serious about, because the value of CTI shouldn't be measured by how sophisticated our intelligence products sound, but by whether the decisions they influence produce better business outcomes. If we stripped away every buzzword in your CTI program tomorrow, would there be enough measurable business impact left to justify its existence?
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Schomer: Hits the nail on the head, James. The gap between board presentations and actual risk reduction usually comes down to architectural reality. We treat security like a vocabulary exercise instead of an engineering problem. If a defense can’t deterministically neutralize a threat at Layer Zero before it forces an outage or drains millions, it’s not an asset—it’s just expensive overhead. Real business