The Dangerous Disconnect Between Security Teams and the C-Suite

The CISO at a mid-sized company stands before her company's board of directors. She's about to deliver what she believes is the most important presentation of her career.

"We're facing an unprecedented threat landscape," she begins, clicking to her first slide filled with network diagrams and threat matrices. "Advanced persistent threats are exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities in our endpoint detection systems. We need immediate investment in next-generation SIEM capabilities and enhanced network segmentation protocols."

Around the mahogany table, she watches as eyes begin to glaze over. The CFO checks his phone. The CEO glances at his watch. The board members shift uncomfortably in their seats. Their minds already drifting to the quarterly earnings call scheduled for next week.

Meanwhile, the CISO’s internal monologue screams: We're one successful exploit away from losing everything, and nobody's listening.

This scene plays out in boardrooms and executive staff meetings across America every day. And it's costing companies billions.

When Two Languages Collide

The problem isn't that executives don't care about security. It's that they speak an entirely different language. Security professionals communicate in technical specifications, threat vectors, and compliance frameworks. Business leaders think in revenue growth, market share, and competitive advantage.

The result? A dangerous disconnect that's getting worse, not better.

Consider the numbers: The average cost of a data breach reached $4.88 million in 2024, marking a 10% increase from the previous year. Yet despite this alarming trend, board-level responsibility for cybersecurity has actually declined from 38% in 2021 to just 27% in 2025. At the exact moment when cyber threats are becoming more dangerous and expensive, executive oversight is diminishing.

But the statistics reveal an even more troubling reality. While 70% of consumers lose trust in companies after a data breach, and 70% would stop shopping with a brand that suffered a security incident, most executives continue to treat cybersecurity like insurance: necessary, boring, and hopefully never needed. Meanwhile, 73% of small business owners have experienced a cyberattack of some kind, yet the boardroom conversation remains focused on quarterly numbers rather than cyber resilience.

This isn't just an organizational problem. It's a market reality that's reshaping which companies survive and thrive.

The Wake-Up Call

In February 2024, the healthcare industry learned this lesson in the most expensive way possible. Change Healthcare, a subsidiary that processes 40% of all U.S. medical claims, fell victim to a ransomware attack that would redefine how we think about cyber risk.

The numbers tell a story of cascading failure: $2.87 billion in total costs to parent company UnitedHealth Group, 100 million patients affected, and healthcare operations disrupted nationwide. Even after paying a $22 million ransom, 74% of hospitals reported direct patient care impacts, and 94% faced financial disruption.

But here's what makes this story particularly revealing: This wasn't just a technology failure. It was a business continuity catastrophe born from a series of calculated business decisions that prioritized efficiency over resilience.

The Business Decisions:

UnitedHealth Group had made strategic choices that created a perfect storm of systemic risk. They had allowed Change Healthcare to become a single point of failure for nearly half of America's healthcare transactions. A business decision that maximized operational efficiency and market dominance but created unprecedented systemic risk.

When investigators examined the breach, they found basic security measures had been deprioritized in favor of operational convenience. The hackers gained access through a Citrix portal that lacked multi-factor authentication. An inexpensive security control that could have prevented a $2.9 billion disaster. This wasn't an oversight. It was a conscious business trade-off between user convenience and security friction.

Even more telling were the architectural decisions that amplified the impact. Change Healthcare's systems were poorly segmented, meaning that once attackers gained access, they could move laterally throughout the network. The company had also failed to isolate backup systems from primary operations, allowing attackers to disable both operations and backups which effectively eliminated the company's ability to recover quickly.

The Risk Acceptance:

Perhaps most critically, the healthcare industry had collectively accepted the risk of extreme vendor concentration. Hospitals, insurance companies, and healthcare providers had allowed themselves to become dependent on a single company for critical functions like claims processing, payment verification, and prescription management. This business decision driven by cost savings and operational simplicity created a systemic vulnerability no individual organization controlled.

The result? When Change Healthcare went offline, it didn't just affect one company. It crippled an entire industry. Hospitals couldn't verify insurance coverage. Pharmacies couldn't process prescriptions. Medical practices couldn't submit claims for payment. The attack revealed  American healthcare had traded resilience for efficiency, creating a house of cards that collapsed when a single critical vendor failed.

The New Rules of Business Success

Executives are recognizing that the traditional business success framework. The classic "Iron Triangle" of cost, schedule, and scope is no longer sufficient. In today's interconnected digital economy, three new factors determine whether companies thrive or merely survive.

Trust has become the new currency. Your customers' data represents both your most valuable asset and your greatest liability. When 70% of consumers stop trusting companies after a data breach, and 70% would stop doing business with a breached brand, customer data protection becomes a direct revenue driver. A single security incident can erase decades of carefully built brand equity overnight.

Resilience has emerged as the new competitive advantage. While competitors struggle to recover from cyberattacks, resilient companies continue serving customers and capturing market share. The Colonial Pipeline example illustrates this perfectly: companies with strong continuity plans didn't just survive the disruption. They thrived while others failed.

Speed has become the new differentiator, but not in the way most people think. Secure companies actually move faster than insecure ones. They adopt new technologies, enter new markets, and pivot business models without hesitation because their cybersecurity foundations are solid. Insecure companies hesitate, stall, or worse become paralyzed by fear of creating new vulnerabilities.

What Winning Organizations Actually Do

The companies that dominate their industries have cracked the code on this communication challenge. They don't just demand that their security teams become more business-fluent. They also cultivate cyber-literate business leadership to ensure their business executives understand how their decisions impact security posture.

Let me say that one more time: They don't just rely on their security teams to be more business fluent. That is only part of the equation. They also have cyber-aware business leaders who better understand the impacts of their decisions.

The Executive Transformation

The most successful CEOs and business leaders have mastered five strategic cyber concepts that every executive needs to understand:

Risk appetite becomes a business strategy question: How much cyber risk can your growth strategy actually support? Leaders know that aggressive expansion into new markets or rapid digital transformation creates new attack surfaces, and they factor this into their strategic planning.

Attack surface translates to business exposure: How many entry points does your business model expose? Every new customer portal, mobile app, or cloud integration creates potential vulnerabilities that must be weighed against business benefits.

Recovery time drives operational planning: How fast can you restart operations after an attack, and do you actually rehearse it? The most prepared companies treat cyber incident response like fire drills and practice regularly.

Compliance cost impacts market strategy: Forward-thinking leaders understand that regulatory penalties can dwarf the immediate costs of a mitigation and definitely a successful breach.

Insurance gaps reveal hidden liabilities: What won't your cyber policy cover, and how does that affect your risk calculus? The best executives don't just buy cyber insurance. They understand exactly what scenarios will leave them financially exposed.

These leaders have also fundamentally changed how they approach cybersecurity governance. Instead of relegating cyber discussions to quarterly check-ins, they've implemented monthly strategic reviews, treating cyber risk with the same rigor they apply to financial performance. Only 27% of businesses currently have board members responsible for cybersecurity, down from 38% in 2021. A trend that winning companies are aggressively reversing.

Perhaps most importantly, these executives have elevated their CISOs to true executive status. Just as they would never force their CFO to report through marketing, they give their security leaders direct access to strategic decision-making. More importantly, they choose CISOs who can translate technical concepts into business impact, not just those with the deepest technical expertise.

The CISO Evolution

On the flip side, the most effective CISOs have learned to completely reframe how they communicate value to business leadership. Instead of leading with technical accomplishments, they've learned to translate threats into business outcomes.

The old way of reporting "We blocked 10,000 attacks this quarter" gets replaced with business impact statements: "We protected $50 million in revenue and avoided six weeks of potential downtime." This isn't just better communication; it's a fundamental shift in how security leaders think about their role in the organization.

These advanced CISOs present risk using simple dashboards that look more like financial reports than technical status updates. They show trends, confidence scores, and business impact, focusing relentlessly on what executives actually care about: revenue protection, compliance status, and competitive advantage. Their monthly reports answer questions like "What's our cyber risk exposure relative to our growth targets?" rather than "How many vulnerabilities did we patch?"

Most importantly, the best CISOs have re-positioned themselves as business enablers rather than gatekeepers. They understand their job isn't to slow down business initiatives. It's to make bold business moves possible, safely. Good security accelerates sales by building customer trust, improves compliance by anticipating regulatory requirements, and enables innovation by creating secure foundations for new technologies.

The 30-Day Transformation Playbook

Bridging this dangerous disconnect doesn't happen overnight, but it can happen systematically. The most successful organizations follow a structured approach that transforms both security communication and business understanding within 30 days.

Week 1: Assess Current State

The first week focuses on reality-checking and baseline assessment. Forward-thinking executives start by asking their CISOs to explain the top three cyber risks in pure business terms. No technical jargon allowed. This isn't just a communication exercise; it reveals whether the CISO truly understands business priorities and whether the executive team grasps their actual risk exposure.

Next, they calculate what a one-week system outage would actually cost in lost revenue, customer impact, and recovery expenses. Most executives are shocked by this number because they've never quantified the business impact of cyber disruption. This calculation becomes the foundation for all future security investment decisions.

The week concludes with what might be the most eye-opening exercise. Actually, reading the cyber insurance policy to assess what it doesn't cover. Most executives have never seen their cyber insurance policy, despite the fact that major gaps in coverage could expose the company to significant financial losses.

Week 2: Improve Communication

Week two emphasizes communication transformation. These companies add "cyber business reviews" to monthly leadership meetings, treating security updates with the same frequency and rigor as financial reviews. These aren't technical briefings. They're strategic discussions about how cyber risks and investments align with business objectives.

They also require security impact assessments for all critical projects, ensuring new business initiatives consider cybersecurity implications from the beginning rather than treating security as an afterthought. This prevents the common scenario where security requirements derail projects late in the development cycle.

The week's most important deliverable is creating a simple cyber dashboard for board meetings that looks more like financial metrics than technical statistics. Instead of showing patch rates and vulnerability counts, these dashboards display business-relevant metrics like "revenue at risk," "compliance status," and "competitive security positioning." Check out Inp² board brief template or cyber risk calculator. It’s exactly what they were built for.

Week 3: Evaluate Investment

The third week involves comprehensive investment evaluation. Smart leaders audit whether their cyber budgets actually match their risk exposure, often discovering significant misalignment's between spending and actual threats. They review organizational charts to ensure CISOs can influence strategy, not just implement it.

Most critically, they identify which business processes would fail completely in a cyber emergency. This exercise often reveals dependencies that senior leadership never considered, leading to improved business continuity planning and more realistic recovery expectations.

Week 4: Build Culture

The final week concentrates on culture building and long-term sustainability. The most successful companies make cybersecurity part of every senior leader's performance review, ensuring cyber risk management becomes a shared responsibility rather than just the CISO's problem.

They require business unit leaders to own cyber risk in their domains, creating accountability for security outcomes throughout the organization. Sales leaders become responsible for customer data protection, operations leaders’ own infrastructure security, and marketing leaders manage digital brand protection.

Finally, they treat cyber incidents like safety incidents with thorough analysis, learning, and improvement processes. This cultural shift removes the stigma around cyber incidents and focuses attention on continuous improvement rather than blame assignment.

The Conversation That Starts Tomorrow

The CISO’s presentation didn't end the way she expected. Instead of approving her budget request, the CEO told her the budget didn’t allow for such a significant capital expense at this time. Had the CEO started with a different question: "If you had to explain our biggest cyber risk and why we need this new SIEM to my eight-year-old daughter, how would you do it?"

That question would change everything. It would force the CISO to stop thinking like a technologist and start communicating like a business leader.

The transformation isn’t just about better communication. It’s about creating a shared understanding that cybersecurity is too important to be left entirely to technologists, and business strategy is too complex to be managed without understanding cyber implications.

The most successful companies have already started this conversation. They've recognized that in today's digital economy, every business decision is a cybersecurity decision, and every cybersecurity decision is a business decision.

The question now is simple: What conversation will you have with your CISO this week? And more importantly, what language will you use to have it?