Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

By: Beth Dannemilller, Senior Director, Product Marketing For years, security operations have been measured by effort. More alerts processed. More data ingested. More tools deployed. It looks like progress. It isn’t. CIOs know the reality. Teams are overwhelmed. Costs keep rising. And when the board asks a simple question, “Are we reducing risk?”, the answer is often unclear. This is the breaking point for the SOC.

Proving compliance is a necessity, but in a world of tightening regulations, the path to compliance is currently paved with spreadsheets, screenshots, and manual attestations. We call this the “Audit Tax”, the millions of dollars and thousands of people hours spent not just integrating security, but on proving you are handling security.

Two significant software supply chain cybersecurity attacks, seven days apart, with one hundred and eighty million weekly downloads between them. The chaos from development teams to the boardroom is real. And the pace is only going to get faster. Much, much faster…

Active Directory (AD) remains the foundational identity and access management system for the vast majority of enterprises globally, making it a prime target for cybercriminals. AD is constantly under attack, and threat actors rarely have to resort to complex, zero-day exploits to breach it. Instead, they rely on a pervasive and persistent vulnerability: everyday misconfigurations.

Operational Technology (OT) security safeguards the industrial systems, networks, and physical processes that power modern society. Unlike Information Technology (IT), which prioritizes data confidentiality, OT security focuses on the availability, reliability, and safety of physical operations, protecting the technology behind turbines, robotic arms, pumps, and pipeline valves.

Your backups survived a ransomware attack. Your team restored everything within hours. And three days later, the same malware is back, encrypting the same files, because nobody checked whether those backups were clean before putting them into production.

Josh Rector is the Compliance Director, Public Sector at Ace of Cloud, a security and compliance consulting firm, certified CMMC Third-Party Assessor Organization (C3PAO), and Registered Provider Organization (RPO). With more than a decade of experience in cybersecurity compliance, he has worked both sides of the assessment table, leading internal and external assessments, serving as ISSO for systems at federal agencies, and guiding cloud service providers through the FedRAMP authorization process.

Learn how GitGuardian supports NHI governance with a secrets-first model that improves visibility, reduces sprawl, and helps teams manage machine identity risk.

There is a widening gap between what most organizations call offensive security testing and what actually keeps them safe. The standard model looks familiar: schedule an annual penetration test, receive a PDF full of color-coded findings, remediate a handful of critical items, and repeat next year. Attackers do not operate in annual cycles. The core problem is not a lack of testing. It is the wrong kind.

Email security often focuses on incoming threats such as phishing, malware, and malicious links, but outbound email security is just as important. According to KnowBe4’s 2025 State of Human Risk Report, nearly half of cybersecurity leaders say misdirected emails sent by employees have caused security incidents. These mistakes typically happen when employees send messages to the wrong recipient, attach the wrong file, or unintentionally share sensitive information.