Cyber Risk Is a Moving Target: Why Traditional Risk Teams Must Rethink Their Approach
In today’s enterprise landscape, risk teams are being tasked with evaluating everything — from financial exposure to regulatory risk, climate impact, supply chain dependencies, and now, cybersecurity. But there’s a fundamental challenge: cyber risk doesn’t behave like any other risk.
Over the past several years, I’ve focused my research and field work on understanding this challenge — not just technically, but operationally. What I found is that most organizations are trying to manage cyber risk with tools and mindsets designed for slower, more stable forms of risk. And that’s why so many attacks succeed not because there was no visibility, but because there was no action in time.
Cyber risk is a moving target. It’s reshaped constantly by two forces that traditional risk frameworks struggle to address: the speed of business and the speed of attacks. Cloud adoption, software releases, new access privileges, an error in a configuration and third-party connections change your environment by the hour. Meanwhile, attackers move with automated tooling, exploit-as-a-service platforms, and AI-accelerated reconnaissance that scans for those changes in real time.
Yet how do we respond? In many cases, we’re using static tools like risk heat maps and quarterly risk registers — snapshots frozen in time — to represent something that has already changed in the past hour. It’s like trying to navigate a storm with last week’s weather map.
While many forms of risk are assessed quarterly or annually, cyber risk changes by the minute. A single misconfiguration, an outdated endpoint, or a newly exposed identity permission can instantly alter your risk posture. What’s low-risk at 9:00 AM can become your next breach vector by noon.
And that’s why traditional enterprise risk management (ERM) frameworks — designed for strategic, slow-moving risk — break down when applied to cyber.
A Different Kind of Risk
Risk teams are experts at modeling. They evaluate economic downturns, assess geopolitical volatility, and model climate scenarios with precision. But cyber risk operates on a plane where:
Velocity trumps stability
Visibility is partial
Attack surfaces are dynamic
The threat landscape is asymmetric
This means that the same system, under the same risk framework, can become significantly more vulnerable within hours, without any intentional business change.
Traditional Risk Models Fall Short
Most enterprise risk teams use frameworks rooted in predictability. But cyber risk doesn’t follow those rules:
It is continuous — not periodic
It is shared — across departments, suppliers, and cloud services
It is dynamic — responding to attacker behavior and business activity simultaneously
What’s not measured in real time, can’t be mitigated in time. That’s the reality risk teams must adapt to.
Why I Created the Cybersecurity Compass
When I developed the Cybersecurity Compass, I wanted to help organizations close the critical gap between cyber risk awareness and action. Breaches often happen not because threats were unknown, but because prioritization was unclear, responsibility was diffused, or action came too late.
That gap usually exists because cyber risk management, if it exists at all, is often relegated to annual reviews or buried under broader tech risk assessments. But cyber risk needs to be continuous, prioritized, and directly aligned to business impact — not something reviewed every six or twelve months.
The Cybersecurity Compass helps risk teams understand:
Where they are: mapping current exposure and preparedness.
Where to focus: identifying business-impactful areas that need attention before a breach.
How to align: connecting cybersecurity actions with enterprise risk and business goals.
When to act: enabling dynamic prioritization based on real-time threat and business context.
I use the metaphor of a stormy ocean of digital assets and threats, in constant motion. In such an environment, the Cybersecurity Compass acts as a navigational system. It helps unify proactive protection, real-time detection, resilience, and governance into a single operational direction — Before, During, and After a breach.
Turning Strategy into Action: The Cyber Risk Management Lifecycle (CRML)
To move beyond theory and make cyber risk operational, I also created the Cyber Risk Management Lifecycle (CRML). This model illustrates how cyber risk should be continuously managed — not just assessed.
CRML emphasizes that cyber risk management is not a static evaluation — it’s a living, breathing process that includes:
Inventorying and contextualizing digital assets
Identifying vulnerabilities, threats, and business consequences
Consolidating and calculating cyber risk in business context
Prioritizing what matters most to the organization
Applying controls and mitigations strategically
Reassessing and validating whether those mitigations reduced risk
Starting the loop again — continuously, not occasionally
But no matter how good the lifecycle design is, it won’t operationalize itself. That’s why we need a new function inside organizations: the Cyber Risk Operations Center (CROC).
Why You Need a CROC
The CROC is to cyber risk what the SOC is to detection and response. It operationalizes the CRML using Cyber RiskOps.
It ensures that cyber risk isn’t just calculated — it’s prioritized, mitigated, tracked, and recalculated at the speed the business demands and attackers exploit. The CROC integrates telemetry, intelligence, automation, and human judgment to answer critical questions in real time:
Where is our risk highest right now?
Are the mitigations we applied actually reducing risk?
What’s changed since yesterday?
What actions must we take before this turns into a breach?
Without a CROC function, organizations are stuck doing cyber risk assessments as theoretical exercises — blind to what’s happening in the environment minute by minute.
A New Mandate for Risk Teams
If your risk team is treating cyber as “just another risk,” it’s time to rethink the model. Cyber requires:
Real-time risk visibility: dashboards and metrics that reflect today’s threat exposure — not last month’s
Cross-functional intelligence: understanding how business growth, cloud adoption, identity sprawl, and supply chain risk influence cyber exposure
Outcome-driven metrics: shifting from control-based reporting to measurable Protection Level Agreements (PLAs) and Outcome-Driven Metrics (ODMs)
Cybersecurity teams alone can’t carry this weight. Risk teams must evolve their own operating model, bringing in the speed, tools, and thinking required to evaluate cyber risk as a live variable — not a static chart in an Excel file.
Call to Action
Cyber risk isn’t like financial risk, legal risk, or even operational risk. It moves faster, spreads wider, and hits harder. The velocity of digital transformation means your risk profile is changing faster than your quarterly assessments can keep up.
To keep pace, risk teams must embrace a cyber-specific mindset: one rooted in continuous evaluation, shared responsibility, and adaptive response. Cyber risk is no longer just an IT problem — it’s an enterprise-wide blind spot for anyone trying to measure risk with outdated tools.
The question is no longer “Is cyber risk part of our enterprise risk portfolio?” It’s “Are we equipped to measure it fast enough to do something about it?”
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