Security Maturity in Practice - Lessons from Real-World Operations

From your experience working across different areas of security operations and risk management, what do you think most organizations still misunderstand about cybersecurity in 2026?

Many organizations still do not understand the value and full dimension of good threat correlation and dynamic criticality. It is common to classify alerts or enforce SLAs based on the perceived importance of a specific type of activity, regardless of whether that detection represents meaningful risk on its own.

If you want to understand what is actually putting your company at risk, you need to correlate as much information as possible instead of treating activities in isolation.

From your experience working with threat modeling in real environments, what mistakes do you see most often when organizations say “we do threat modeling,” but it does not actually reduce risk?

A very common mistake is believing that more rules automatically mean better security. In less mature environments or services starting from zero, adding rules is normal and sometimes necessary. The problem appears when the rule pool keeps growing indefinitely.

At some point, objectives must change. Effort should shift toward maintaining, validating, and cleaning existing rules. Otherwise, you end up with an unmanageable and outdated rule set. In that situation, risk is not reduced because you are overwhelmed by detections without confidence that they all still work correctly.

How has threat modeling changed with the massive adoption of cloud, CI and CD, and hybrid environments? What still has not adapted well?

One negative change has been the preparation of front-line analysts when dealing with cloud-related detections. These detections are often treated like any other alert, even though cloud infrastructure is fundamentally different.

Analysts need to understand that cloud detections are based on different infrastructure models. With this evolution, baseline expectations for analysts should increase, especially regarding foundational knowledge. Treating cloud alerts as just another detection creates blind spots.

Which alerts or incident types still consume too much time without providing real value?

A major time drain comes from being too permissive when it comes to remediating infrastructure and compliance issues that generate detection noise.

Organizations get used to living with problems such as:

• unsigned binaries
• outdated software
• legacy or misconfigured systems

This creates constant noise in detection logic. Over time, analysts become conditioned to expect alerts that do not require action. There is nothing worse than analyst disengagement caused by waiting for activity that does not need to be reported.

If you had to redesign a security monitoring function from scratch for 2026, what would you remove first and what would you automate without hesitation?

The first thing I would remove is communication gaps between security delivery teams and commercial or stakeholder-facing functions. You cannot offer an effective service if what is promised is disconnected from what can actually be delivered.

In terms of automation, I would start with reporting and internal communication workflows. Reporting consumes a significant amount of time at the management layer, and operational workflows often introduce delays due to manual validation steps.

Automating these processes not only saves time, but also allows better metrics around response times and capacity, which in turn improves decision making. Both points are essential for security teams that want to scale without degrading quality.

From your experience supporting and coordinating incident response, what differentiates organizations that simply survive an incident from those that come out stronger afterward?

Documentation is key, but documentation alone is not enough. Lessons learned often remain as forgotten documents if they are not easy to access when needed.

What matters is:

• how documentation is organized
• how it is tagged or classified
• where it lives

Additionally, organizations cannot take too long to identify the failures that caused the incident and act on them. The pace of work is fast, and if improvements are delayed, they are quickly replaced by the next problem, leaving valuable lessons unused.

What is the biggest human or organizational failure that still appears in incident management, even in mature companies?

A major human failure is not providing proper feedback on escalation decisions. This creates hesitation and affects the escalation chain, delaying critical decisions.

Escalating incidents and taking action has a cost, and unnecessary escalations should be addressed constructively. Teams need to understand why an escalation was not needed, instead of being made afraid to act. Otherwise, fear replaces judgment, which is far more dangerous.

Which soft skills are critical for cybersecurity leaders today and still undervalued?

Delegation, task prioritization, and time management. While these skills are not necessarily undervalued in theory, they are rarely actively developed.

As a result, many leaders struggle with these skills, creating unsustainable bottlenecks. Technical excellence does not automatically translate into effective leadership.

What early signs indicate that a security team is burning out, even when KPIs still look fine?

A general lack of proactivity. Not every analyst will be proactive, but when proactivity drops across a team as a whole, it is a strong indicator of burnout.

If proactive actions and improvement proposals decrease significantly, it often means analysts are disengaging and may already be looking for opportunities elsewhere, even if performance metrics still look healthy.

For someone working today in a detection-focused role who wants to evolve into coordination or threat-focused security roles, what should they start learning now?

When people move into coordination or management roles, they rarely receive formal training in people management. There is often an assumption that soft skills come naturally to strong technical performers, which is not true.

Anyone looking to evolve into these roles should actively learn how to manage emotions and team dynamics. A good leader understands the mental state of their team, which builds trust.

For threat-focused security work, understanding how frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK are structured and why they exist is essential. You do not need to memorize them, but you must understand the terminology and intent behind the classification.

If you could give only one piece of advice to organizations to improve their security posture in 2026, what would it be?

Invest more in Purple Teaming. It is essential for maintaining effective detections, especially for attack scenarios that are not common.

Event ingestion and log collection evolve constantly. Purple Team activities help verify that updates to tooling or pipelines have not broken detection integrity, often uncovering improvement opportunities across multiple stages of security operations.

After years on the front line of cybersecurity, what still motivates you, and what would you change without hesitation?

What motivates me most is working with teams that enjoy what they do and feel supported in how they work. Motivation grows when people can build better detections, understand attacks more deeply, and see the quality of their work improve.

What I would change is the lack of awareness around stress management in cybersecurity. This is a high-pressure field with significant responsibility. Burnout should not be taboo, and organizations should invest more seriously in the mental health of security teams.

So What?

Taken together, these answers point to an uncomfortable reality.

Most security failures in 2026 are not caused by a lack of tools, frameworks, or threat intelligence. They come from unmanaged complexity, accepted noise, and human hesitation under pressure.

Across different layers of security work, from detection to response to proactive risk analysis, the same patterns repeat:

• correlation is undervalued while alerts are overvalued
• rules accumulate faster than they are maintained
• cloud changes infrastructure, but not expectations
• noise is tolerated instead of remediated
• escalation is feared instead of understood
• lessons are documented but not reused
• burnout appears long before metrics reflect it

Security maturity does not emerge from adding more controls.
It emerges from deciding what deserves attention, what must be maintained, and what needs to stop.

The organizations that improve are not the ones that react faster to every signal.
They are the ones that reduce noise, clarify responsibility, and create space for judgment.

That is what security maturity looks like in practice.