If we’re honest, most cybersecurity frameworks today look great on paper. They accommodate all the buzzwords: NIST, ISO, risk registers, control matrices. They pass audits and have impressive-looking dashboards.
And yet, glaring gaps remain.
Incidents still happen not because people aren’t working hard, but because the systems guiding them are either too rigid, too detached from real operations, or too focused on compliance over context. Governance and risk management, the backbone of any cybersecurity program, often devolve into disconnected documents instead of living, strategic systems that adapt along with the business.
I’ve seen this disconnect up close. As a cybersecurity expert and former Head of Global Application Security Services at Sony, as well as Director of Cyber Security at Jagex, I’ve spent nearly two decades working across gaming and global enterprises. In that time, I’ve built and scaled security programs from scratch, not just to meet regulatory expectations, but to embed risk thinking into the engineering culture itself.
In this article, I’ll explore some of the most common governance and risk management gaps I’ve encountered in today’s cybersecurity landscape and how to close them.
Where Governance and Risk Management Typically Fail
Cybersecurity isn’t failing because we don’t have frameworks. It’s failing because we keep mistaking frameworks for action.
Most organizations think they’re secure because they’ve ticked the right boxes. They’ve aligned with NIST, written policies, and maybe even built a risk register. But the real question is: are those frameworks alive in your operations?
For me, the answer often starts with asking one deceptively simple question: “Who actually owns risk here?”
Governance Gaps That Undermine Real Security
-
Siloed Responsibility
Governance often lives with compliance or legal, far removed from the engineers writing code or the teams shipping products. That disconnection breeds friction. Developers feel security is being “thrown over the wall.” Risk managers feel ignored. And nobody truly owns implementation.
-
Security as an Afterthought
Too many organizations still bolt security on at the end of the pipeline. In gaming, for instance, this leads to late-stage vulnerability scrambles that stall releases or compromise player safety.
-
Misuse of Frameworks
Frameworks like ISO 27001 or CIS Controls are valuable, but they become dangerous when treated as the goal, rather than a baseline. I call this “framework theater”: doing things because the checklist says so, not because they reduce real risk.
-
Lack of Visibility
Governance means accountability. But if your executive team can’t clearly see where your cyber risks lie or how they map to business impact, then you’re leading in the dark.
At Sony, I implemented a risk dashboard tailored to executive needs, clean, actionable, and tied to specific owners. That’s what transforms governance from paper into power. If a risk can’t be understood at the leadership level, it won’t get resourced or resolved.
Risk Management Pitfalls That Quietly Escalate Threats
-
Static Risk Registers
If your risk register is a quarterly Excel sheet that nobody reads outside of audits, you don’t have a risk program, you have a record-keeping exercise. Real risk changes fast. Tools and strategies need to keep up.
-
Subjective Scoring
Risk is often assessed using vague heat maps or “gut-feel” ratings. Without consistent criteria, two teams facing the same vulnerability might rank it completely differently. That inconsistency erodes trust and leads to misaligned priorities.
-
Disconnect from Business Operations
One of the most damaging gaps is cultural: security teams and product teams speak different languages. Security flags issues, but doesn’t always explain how they impact product timelines, revenue, or user trust. Product ignores them, not out of malice, but out of misalignment.
I’ve seen companies where security is viewed as the ‘department of no’. But if you involve product managers early, show them how threats affect user experience or brand reputation, they become some of your strongest allies.
Strategy Over Patching: How to Fix These Gaps
You don’t fix governance with documents. You fix it by changing how people make decisions every day.
The instinct, especially in larger organizations, is to patch the gap: update a policy, roll out new tooling, maybe schedule a few awareness trainings. But these are surface-level fixes. The real work starts by rebuilding how governance and risk are understood, owned, and actioned across the business.
Here’s how I approach it and what your team can take away.
Governance Fixes That Work
-
Create Cross-Functional Security Councils
Governance should not be the sole domain of CISOs and compliance leads. Bring in engineering, product, and even marketing to quarterly governance councils. This breaks down silos and turns governance into a shared responsibility, not a top-down directive.
-
Give Teams Tools, Not Tasks
Telling a development team to “think about risk” isn’t helpful. Give them static code analysis tools, secure coding guidelines, and automated SDLC checks, embedded into their existing workflows. The best governance is the kind that disappears into daily practice.
-
Make Security Part of Budget and Architecture Reviews
I always emphasize that security needs a seat at the planning table. If your threat modeling happens after the architecture is locked, it’s already too late. Security reviews should be aligned with procurement, architecture decisions, and OKR planning, not bolted on after launch.
-
Get Comfortable with Customization
A mature governance model adapts to business needs. Don’t be afraid to deviate from frameworks if a custom approach works better, as long as you can prove it reduces risk. Frameworks are a compass, not a cage.
Smarter Risk Management Starts with Real-Time Thinking
-
Move from Static to Dynamic Risk Scoring
My teams have moved away from old-school risk matrices toward real-time scoring models that combine threat intelligence, vulnerability data, and asset criticality. This approach enables leadership to make decisions based on current threats, not outdated heat maps.
-
Tie Risk to Product Impact
When a developer knows how a vulnerability could delay a release or cause churn, they act faster. Use business context, user exposure, revenue impact, and legal risk to prioritize remediation work.
-
Automate Contextual Risk Insights
Leverage tools that correlate detected vulnerabilities with known exploits, CVSS scores, and your internal asset database. This saves engineers hours of triage and gives execs a clearer sense of urgency.
-
Use Agile Retrospectives for Risk Reviews
Governance doesn’t need a special meeting. It needs consistency. Inject security and risk reflection into your team’s sprint retros. This builds a continuous improvement loop without extra overhead.
Most people think risk management is a once-a-quarter report. But real risk lives in code commits, design docs, and feature launches. That’s where your framework should live, too.
Best Practices from the Field
There’s theory, and then there’s what works in the wild. I’ve spent nearly two decades navigating both startup and enterprise trenches, from Sony’s vast global infrastructure to fast-paced game development pipelines. Along the way, I’ve seen what breaks, what scales, and what earns trust across technical and executive teams.
Here are the practices that consistently deliver.
Build the Program Before the Crisis
In my projects, I didn’t wait for a breach or audit finding to start building a full-spectrum security program. I proactively defined a roadmap that matured the studio’s security capabilities year-over-year, instead of chasing quick wins.
- I implemented summarized cyber risk dashboards for execs, not technical data dumps, but clean visuals that showed risk owners, business exposure, and mitigation status.
- Simultaneously, I worked with engineering to embed secure SDLC practices into development workflows, minimizing disruption to product velocity.
Compliance Is Not the Goal – It’s the Floor
I’ve managed compliance engagements for PCI-DSS, GDPR, and frameworks like NIST CSF, but I caution against treating compliance as a strategic goal.
If your only reason for doing something is because a policy told you to, you’re already missing the point.
At Sony, I worked to separate compliance from control ownership by mapping controls to real business processes, not just audit spreadsheets. This helped reduce checkbox mentality and got teams truly invested in outcomes.
Train for Real Threats, Not Just Awareness
Annual compliance training doesn’t build resilience. What works is hands-on, scenario-based learning tailored to teams’ actual roles.
At Sony, I introduced threat simulation workshops where teams roleplayed attacker paths based on real vulnerabilities in their systems. I also brought in offensive security experts to explain modern threat patterns to non-security teams.
- For developers: secure coding workshops with real codebase examples.
- For product teams: threat modeling aligned with upcoming feature rollouts.
- For execs: board-level simulations showing the business impact of hypothetical breaches.
People respond to relevance. If they see how security affects their job and their success, they pay attention.
Invest in Talent the Way You Invest in Tools
I don’t just hire security engineers, I build talent pipelines. At Sony, I launched global cybersecurity recruitment programs, partnering with universities and creating hands-on experiences to find and develop the right candidates.
- My team’s growth strategy focused on potential, not prestige: training sharp, passionate candidates into specialists through mentorship and guided immersion.
- This strategy helped me scale a high-performing team across continents, without burning budgets on unicorn hires.
How to Know If Your Cybersecurity Framework Works
You’ve rewritten the policies. You’ve built the dashboards. You’ve run the workshops. But how do you know if your cybersecurity framework is working?
This is the part most organizations skip or fudge. Either they measure too much and drown in metrics nobody reads, or too little and miss warning signs entirely. My philosophy is simple: measure what drives decisions. Not vanity metrics. Not audit comfort. Business clarity.
While at Sony, I built the Global Application Security Services function from the ground up, defining KPIs and SLAs aligned with business needs, ensuring that service providers and internal teams met clearly established performance benchmarks.
The Metrics That Matter for a Solid Cybersecurity Framework
-
Mean Time to Detect and Respond (MTTD/MTTR)
Still one of the most telling KPIs. Track how quickly you identify threats and resolve them, then benchmark against industry standards. MTTD/MTTR tells you how much pain you’re avoiding. If your response takes days, your governance isn’t real – it’s decorative.
-
Risk Acceptance and Ownership Rates
Measure how many identified risks actually have assigned owners. Then measure how many are remediated within the risk tolerance window you define. Why it matters: Risk without ownership is a liability in disguise.
-
Security Sign-Offs per Product
Release If your products regularly go live without security approval, your governance isn’t embedded. Conversely, tracking secure release rates (automated or manual) shows how well security is integrated into delivery.
-
Repeat Vulnerabilities Across Sprints
Security debt is often revealed in repetition. Are the same issues being flagged sprint after sprint? If so, your training or architecture may be flawed.
-
Stakeholder Confidence Score
Run quarterly internal surveys across engineering, product, and leadership. Ask: “How confident are you in our ability to detect and manage security risks?” Track trends.
Make Security KPIs Business KPIs
The most mature organizations don’t report risk in isolation. They report it in context:
- How did a new security tool reduce development overhead?
- How did faster threat detection prevent a costly production delay?
- How did risk mitigation support a successful launch in a high-risk geo?
I call this narrative reporting – pairing metrics with outcomes so leadership can connect cybersecurity to real-world performance.
When you show execs that good security helped meet a revenue target, they stop seeing it as overhead. They see it as leverage.
Integrating Cybersecurity with Business Strategy
For many organizations, cybersecurity exists in parallel to business strategy. It’s a necessary function, but not a driver. It gets budgeted after the roadmap is set, looped in after decisions are made, and rarely credited when things go right.
That’s a mistake.
My approach flips this model. Security isn’t a separate concern. It’s an enabler of smarter, faster, and more resilient business decisions. And integrating it starts by changing how security leaders show up in the room.
Security as a Strategic Lever
At Sony, I led global security services that worked directly with business and product teams, not just IT. My approach was simple: map technical risks to commercial realities and make security a driver of smarter decisions.
Across my projects, security wasn’t a blocker. It was built to accelerate innovation, reduce surprises, and clarify trade-offs. Real influence starts when security leaders can say, “Here’s the risk and here’s how we ship safely without delay.”
Connecting Cyber to Growth, Not Just Risk
Security impacts growth, whether through customer trust, operational uptime, or brand reputation. I see this as a blind spot for most leadership teams. When risk is viewed only through the lens of loss prevention, the full strategic value of security is missed.
Examples include:
- Supporting faster geographic expansion by aligning with local data compliance from day one
- Reducing go-to-market friction by proactively resolving app security blockers in the sprint
- Building trust with gamers by baking anti-cheat and abuse mitigation into game mechanics at the design stage
This isn’t theory. It’s how security becomes a contributor to product quality, user experience, and ultimately revenue.
The Boardroom Belongs to Cyber, Too
The most mature companies now expect cybersecurity leaders to brief the board alongside CTOs and COOs. But presence isn’t enough. I always emphasize that CISOs must speak the language of risk-adjusted growth, not alerts per second.
That means:
- Framing incidents in terms of potential revenue or reputational impact
- Quantifying how risk mitigation improves operational efficiency
- Showing how secure architecture choices align with innovation goals
Security leaders who make these connections don’t just earn a seat at the table – they shape what happens at it.
From Governance Gap to Competitive Advantage
Security frameworks don’t fail for lack of expertise. They fail when we mistake paperwork for protection and compliance for strategy.
Real change starts by addressing the invisible gaps: unclear risk ownership, performative governance, and meaningless metrics. But recognition isn’t enough. Action is. And that requires leadership.
I’ve built security programs that go beyond audits, embedding security into both game development and enterprise strategy. My philosophy is simple: make risk visible, make ownership real, and make security practical for everyone.
This isn’t just about reducing threats. It’s about building faster, more resilient organizations.
The path forward:
- Equip teams with the tools and context to manage risk
- Embed governance into product development
- Track outcomes that drive real decisions
- Integrate security into how your company thinks
Done right, security isn’t a cost. It’s a competitive edge.
