IT Wants to Have a Talk With You About Cybersecurity — And You’re Not Going to Like It
- Hector R. Lopez
- Dec 8, 2025
- 6 min read
There’s a cybersecurity governance conversation trying to happen inside your organization right now.
IT wants to have it.
Leadership doesn’t realize it’s overdue.
Cyber risk is widening quietly in the space between them.
Both sides have built walls:
IT builds walls to protect operational uptime, network security, cloud security, and business process continuity.
Leadership builds walls to stay focused on strategic risk, revenue, and regulatory exposure — far from technical details.
Cybersecurity gets squeezed in the middle, responsible for cyber risk management but stripped of the authority, budget, and governance needed to perform it.
And because no one intentionally reconnects after the implicit handoff, cybersecurity ownership becomes assumed — not designed.
The Cybersecurity Conversation Missing in IT Governance
In most organizations, cybersecurity appears only as:
a line in an IT governance meeting,
a phishing test update,
a new tool request,
or a reference to a recent cyber attack or ransomware headline.
But the most important question never surfaces:
“Who actually owns cyber risk in this organization?”
According to the Verizon DBIR, a significant percentage of breaches stem from people failures — not technical ones.
Leadership assumes IT owns cybersecurity. IT assumes leadership understands the risks. Cybersecurity assumes someone clearly defined governance.
No one revisits the assumption.
No one aligns decision rights.
No one asks again until a problem becomes visible.
By then, the risk has already compounded.
The Wall IT Built: Operational IT Governance Without Enterprise Cyber Governance
IT never asked to govern cyber risk.
They inherited it because they manage technology — not because they manage enterprise risk.
Operational IT priorities dominate their time:
Restoring systems when workflows break
Maintaining network security and cloud environments
Supporting automation and business productivity
Keeping ERP/EMR/POS/finance systems online
Handling outages, tickets, onboarding, and escalations
These are revenue-protecting activities. They are urgent. And they drown out long-horizon cybersecurity monitoring.
IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach report notes that breaches take an average of 241 days to identify and contain, often because security alerts sit un-investigated while IT handles business process demands.
IT’s wall isn’t incompetence. It’s the predictable result of incentives:
Uptime > Anything
Tickets > Threat hunts
User impact > Long-term risk
Business continuity > Security analysis
So security monitoring gets deprioritized.
Alerts get ignored.
Incidents escalate quietly.
This is why “IT owns cybersecurity” collapses under real-world pressure: IT is structured for operational resilience, not cyber risk governance.
The Wall Leadership Built: Strategic Risk Without Cyber Governance
Leadership governs strategic risk:
markets,
customer impact,
regulatory exposure,
investor expectations,
reputational harm,
business resilience.
Cyber risk belongs in that category — but it rarely feels that way.
Because cybersecurity is wrapped in technical language, executives avoid engaging deeply with it. Not out of neglect, but out of unfamiliarity.
So an assumption forms:
“Cybersecurity is technical. IT will handle it.”
That assumption is not cybersecurity risk management. It is risk governance by omission.
Leadership never sets:
cyber risk appetite,
cross-functional responsibilities,
governance for monitoring,
investment criteria,
escalation paths,
measurable resilience outcomes.
And because these decisions are never made intentionally, cybersecurity remains structurally adrift.
Where Cybersecurity Gets Squeezed: Accountability Without Authority
Cybersecurity is expected to:
Interpret threat intelligence
Manage incident response
Guide vulnerability assessment
Align controls to reasonable security expectations
Communicate cyber risk in business terms
Govern third-party and supply chain risk
Support audits, regulators, and insurers
But cybersecurity often controls:
no budget,
no business processes,
no risk appetite,
no authority to enforce changes,
no seat in strategic decision-making.
They are responsible for cyber risk but not empowered to govern it.
This is the squeeze point. It is universal. It is structural.
And it is why cybersecurity fails silently until the consequences become un-ignorable.
A Real-World Example: The Cost of Silence and the Two-Wall Squeeze
Before a recent incident, leadership told us:
“Talk to IT. They handle cybersecurity.”
IT told us:
“We don’t have a cybersecurity budget.”
We recommended:
a cybersecurity governance assessment,
a POA&M,
and a risk-based budget calibrated to real exposure.
Before they acted, the incident happened.
Afterward, IT estimated they needed $450,000 annually for cybersecurity — for a small organization — almost entirely focused on tools and automation.
The expectation was that software could solve a cross-functional fluency and risk governance problem.
But tools do not create governance. Dashboards do not create accountability. Automation does not create understanding.
The result:
more reports,
more spreadsheets,
more dashboards,
…but no one could explain which cyber risks had decreased, which remained, or who owned which responsibilities.
This is why “tooling our way out of governance failures” is the most expensive mistake organizations make.
For deeper context on this dynamic, see BravoCheck’s post:
Why IT Misses Alerts: Business Process Demands Consume Everything
Organizations unintentionally set IT up to fail at cybersecurity.
IT becomes the catch-all function for:
broken workflows,
automation requests,
system outages,
employee access issues,
business continuity interruptions.
These issues are loud, immediate, and directly tied to revenue.
Cybersecurity alerts are quiet.
Leadership feels outages. No one “feels” unmonitored alerts — until attackers exploit them.
NIST’s Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 highlights continuous monitoring and response as foundational governance requirements — not optional IT tasks. When monitoring is deprioritized, gaps widen invisibly.
And the sequence becomes inevitable:
Business problems overwhelm IT.
Security monitoring slips.
Alerts accumulate.
Low-grade incidents go unnoticed.
Breaches escalate.
Leadership discovers the gap after the damage.
This is not an IT failure. It is a governance failure — predictable, preventable, and correctable.
How Cybersecurity Governance Realigns Leadership, IT, and Risk
Walls collapse when governance is intentional.
A strategy-first cyber governance framework gives each group what it actually needs:
Leadership Gains Strategic Cyber Risk Management
Clear risk appetite for cybersecurity
Prioritized risk registers tied to impact
Measurable resilience outcomes
Audit-ready documentation
Confidence speaking to regulators, insurers, boards, and partners
This is the core argument of BravoCheck’s post:
IT Gains Operational Clarity, Not More Burden
Feasible, risk-aligned requirements
Reduced firefighting
Defined roles in incident response
Separation between operational tasks and risk governance
Relief from being the accidental owner of enterprise cyber risk
Cybersecurity Gains Authority Matched to Accountability
Defined responsibilities
Governance aligned to a framework like NIST CSF and reasonable security
Control over monitoring and cross-functional incident response
Ability to trace every technical activity back to risk reduction
The organizational structure needed to succeed
At BravoCheck, we operate in this intersection by design.
Our role is to unify leadership, IT, and cybersecurity into a single, defensible risk governance model.
What Changes When Cybersecurity Is Governed, Not Assumed
When governance is intentional:
Cyber risk becomes measurable.
Budgets align to impact, not tools.
Incident response integrates technical, operational, and regulatory realities.
Leadership understands cyber risk as strategic risk.
IT governance aligns with enterprise risk management.
Cybersecurity becomes a business function — not an island.
Organizations move from reactive to resilient.
One small organization that adopted cyber governance with BravoCheck closed a regulatory inquiry with zero findings and gained a measurable reduction in cyber risk within 90 days.
Common Questions About Cybersecurity Governance
“Isn’t this what the CISO handles?”
Not alone. Cyber risk is enterprise risk. A CISO cannot govern business processes, budgets, or strategic risk without leadership-defined governance.
“Do we need to reorganize IT?”
Rarely. You need to redesign decision-making, not org charts. Governance achieves clarity without disruption.
If IT Wants to Talk About Cybersecurity, Listen
IT protects systems. Leadership protects strategy.
Both walls are rational. Both are understandable.
But when those walls prevent the organization from governing cyber risk, the outcome is predictable — and preventable.
If cybersecurity feels squeezed in your organization, you don’t have a personnel problem.
You have a governance problem.
And governance is fixable.
Bring leadership, IT, and cybersecurity into the same conversation. Design your cyber governance intentionally. Build measurable resilience before the incident — not after.
That’s how organizations graduate from assumption to alignment, and from exposure to resilience.
If you’re ready to collapse walls, move from tools to governance, and from noise to measurable risk reduction, see our About page and learn how BravoCheck’s cross-functional approach, and certifications across cybersecurity disciplines can help.
Let’s identify your real exposure, prioritize what matters most, and build a cybersecurity program that actually protects your business.
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