Organisations are investing more heavily in cybersecurity than ever before. New platforms and tools, expanding budgets, and skilled teams should, in theory, deliver stronger protection. Yet despite these investments, many businesses continue to suffer significant operational disruption and financial loss from cyber incidents – often because they have not embedded the missing layer: business context.
As cyber threats grow in both volume and sophistication – fuelled by the expanding attack surface and the rapid rise of AI-powered attacks – security teams find themselves drowning in exposures they struggle to contextualise. Millions of vulnerabilities may exist, but without the ability to map those exposures to asset criticality and business impact, organisations remain reactive, not strategic.
The 2025 State of Cyber Risk Assessment Report, conducted with Dark Reading, found that nearly half of organisations have a formal cyber risk program. The issue is the majority still approach cyber risk as a technical problem rather than a business problem. They focus on vulnerability counts, patch cycles, and severity scores – often without assessing whether the risk in question could materially affect the company’s ability to operate, generate revenue, or serve customers.
This disconnect between security operations and business priorities is more than an oversight – it’s a structural weakness. When security leaders lack business context – understanding which assets are truly critical, what downtime costs the organisation, and which risks could trigger regulatory fines – resources end up spread thinly across the entire attack surface. And what initially appeared to be a strong cybersecurity investment, quickly proves ineffective where it matters most.
From reputational damage to operational loss
Historically, breaches were discussed in terms of reputational fallout – front-page headlines, shaken customer trust, brand damage. While those impacts remain relevant, today’s reality is more direct: cyber incidents increasingly inflict immediate operational disruption and financial loss.
A ransomware breach can halt production lines, delay shipments, and push a business into breach of contract penalties. A supply chain compromise can cascade through partners, triggering costly service outages.
The introduction of shadow AI and poorly governed AI tools into the workplace has added new dimensions to this risk, with breaches involving AI now driving additional incident response costs and regulatory scrutiny.
In other words, business risk and cyber threats have collided. Incidents are no longer “just” IT problems – they are business continuity events, with measurable financial consequences.
Too much data, not enough context
Amid a surge in both the volume and sophistication of cyber threats – amplified by the expanding complexity of the attack surface – security teams now face millions of exposures at any given time. While the technical foundations for cyber risk management exist, without the ability to map these risks against business priorities, they’re forced to manage them in isolation. Asset visibility remains one of organisations’ biggest blind spots.
This leads to what many describe as a game of “exposure whack-a-mole”: vulnerabilities are found and fixed one by one, without a clear sense of which issues pose the greatest danger to the business. The situation is made worse by manual bottlenecks – long handovers between teams, siloed metrics, and reliance on outdated risk scoring models like CVSS alone. In our research, nearly one in five organisations still rank vulnerabilities using only single-factor severity scores, and just 18% update asset risk profiles monthly.
The outcome is a cycle of high activity but low impact – where critical risks remain unresolved, resources are drained, and the organisation’s true exposure to business disruption is never fully addressed.
Risk maturity without context
The good news is that cyber risk programs are maturing. More organisations are embedding structured processes, incorporating threat intelligence, and ensuring that cyber risk is on the boardroom agenda. Ninety per cent of organisations now provide regular cyber risk updates to their boards – a significant step forward from even a few years ago.
But this progress is undermined by a persistent gap: the translation of technical risk into business and financial impact. Only 30% of organisations prioritise risk based on business objectives, and just 14% present risk reporting to the board in measurable financial terms. Without this translation, decision-makers receive more data, but not necessarily more clarity on which threats could cause the greatest operational or financial harm.
Moving from detection to direction
Closing the gap requires re-engineering the way organisations think about and manage cyber risk. That starts with integrating asset criticality, operational dependencies, and financial impact into every decision.
It also requires moving away from purely reactive methods and embracing automation and AI – not as a buzzword, but as an operational enabler. The scale and speed of modern threats simply outpace manual methods. Without automated, self-orchestrating processes that can turn raw data into actionable insights, prioritise in real time, and coordinate remediation across teams, risk will always outpace response.
In practice, this means security leaders need to quantify potential loss through scenario modelling that ties incidents to revenue, cost, and compliance exposure; prioritise remediation efforts based on business impact rather than severity scores alone; automating the entire risk lifecycle – from detection to remediation – to reduce dwell time for critical exposures; and improve board reporting with security metrics that clearly link cyber risk to business outcomes and value protection.
Cybersecurity as a business function
When cybersecurity operates as an IT silo, it’s destined to be reactive, costly, and misaligned. When it operates as a business function, it becomes a driver of resilience.
Cybersecurity done well is no longer about having the most tools or the biggest data lake. It’s about making smarter, faster, more aligned decisions that protect the organisation’s ability to operate, compete, and deliver value. The organisations that make this shift will not only reduce their risk exposure, they will ensure every dollar spent on cybersecurity delivers measurable value to the business.
