Prevention is dead: Modern CISOs win by containing breaches, not avoiding them, turning cyber disasters into manageable events.
What keeps CISOs up at night isn’t if a breach will happen — it’s what comes next. Welcome to the new age of cybersecurity. The old playbook of total prevention has given way to a more pragmatic mindset: Breaches will happen, so how do we deal with the fallout?
CISOs are now spending less energy trying to keep every threat at bay. They know attackers will get in — but the question is, what’s next? The new mindset is about stopping intruders from moving around and escalating the damage.
This shift means investing in sharper visibility, smarter automation and tighter internal controls. It also necessitates relinquishing the belief that the front door serves as the sole line of defense. Now, it’s about shutting internal doors before attackers can roam and wreak havoc.
Picture your infrastructure as a ship. It’s not just about keeping water out. You need to ensure that if it gets in, it floods only one compartment and not the whole vessel. That’s the essence of containment: limiting the blast radius inside the network.
To make this work, companies are isolating workloads and segmenting networks with greater precision. Access is granted strictly on a need-to-know basis within sealed environments. If one segment is compromised, attackers hit a barrier – ideally triggering a response before going further.
This model reduces both damage and recovery time. You don’t want to be in the headlines just because you didn’t contain the breach. Today, containing the blast radius often determines the difference between a public crisis and a peaceful resolution.