When a CISO is invited into a board meeting, oftentimes, the lights dim, a scary heatmap of thwarted attacks appears on the screen, and the Audit Committee asks something like: “Are we safe?”
It is a necessary ritual, but it is also, frankly, a waste of an asset.
While the board obsesses over the perimeter, they ignore the fact that a mature, unified security platform is sitting on a goldmine of business intelligence. And because it sits at the intersection of every user, every application and every data stream, the security platform is the only system that sees an organization’s behavior.
If you stop looking at your security stack as a shield and start treating it as a sensor, it reveals three critical truths about your business that some CFOs and COOs might be missing.
1. True Velocity of Innovation — And What’s Destroying It
Let’s admit it: Every CEO believes their organization is agile. After all, they have the numbers, personnel and slide decks to prove it. But the security platform holds the data on the real friction within the machinery.
Consider the shadow AI phenomenon. We know that 78% of enterprises are actively using AI.1 Yet, only 6% have a mature strategy for it.2 A traditional view sees this as a risk to block.
A platform view sees this as market research.
When a unified security platform correlates web traffic with endpoint activity, it does more than catch malware. It maps user intent and reveals which AI tools your developers are smuggling into their workflows to write code faster. Plus, it shows which large language models your marketing team is using to bypass agency costs.
This behavior goes beyond a simple compliance violation. It marks a signal of unmet demand. The platform reveals where your employees are desperate to innovate but are underserved by corporate IT. Also, it reveals the “drag coefficients” — the specific policy bottlenecks where compliant projects go to die.
A CISO looking at this data can tell the board: “We aren’t losing speed because of hackers. We’re losing speed because our architecture forces our smartest people to work in the dark.”
2. The “Interest Rate” on Your Technical Debt
In mergers and acquisitions, due diligence is typically a financial and legal colonoscopy. Analysts scour the books for hidden liabilities. But they rarely check the “cyber balance sheet,” which is where the concept of security debt moves from a metaphor to a metric.
The average enterprise is currently stitching together 83 different security tools from 29 vendors. In a fragmented state, this is just “IT clutter.” But through the lens of a unified platform, this fragmentation reveals the organization’s operational fragility.
A platform audit acts like an MRI for M&A risk. It quantifies the cost of complexity. It reveals how many hours are wasted manually correlating data between incompatible systems. It exposes the “interest payments” the company is making in the form of high turnover (burnout) and slow remediation times.
If you are acquiring a company, you’re buying their revenue and you’re inheriting their architecture.
3. The Reality of Resilience
Recent research from Unit 42 shows that agentic AI can compress what was once a multiday ransomware campaign into roughly 25 minutes. This security statistic is terrifying, but it’s also a profound operational metric. It reveals that the speed of business disruption now exceeds the speed of human reaction.
A mature platform is perhaps the truest tangible way to measure the resilience of your revenue streams. By correlating uptime data with threat activity, the platform provides a real-time view of business continuity risk. It moves the metric from mean time to detect (a technical stat) to revenue at risk per minute (a business stat).
The Pivot from Cost Center to Growth Engine
The data required to steer a modern enterprise through the AI economy is already flowing through your SOC. But because we have mentally siloed security as “protection,” we treat this data as exhaust — something to be analyzed for threats and then discarded.
The CISO of 2026 is not just the Chief “No” Officer. If they are leveraging a mature, unified platform, they are also the keeper of their organization’s data fabric. They know which departments are innovating, which processes are broken, and where the next acquisition target is hiding their skeletons.
The question the board should ask is no longer “Are we safe?” It is: “What does the security data tell us about who we are?” Only the right questions can lead to the right solutions.
Curious about what else Ben has to say? Check out his other articles on Perspectives.
1“How many companies use AI in 2026? Key statistics and industry trends,” Hostinger, January 13, 2026.
2“KPMG U.S. survey: Executives expect generative AI to have enormous impact on business, but unprepared for immediate adoption”, KPMG, June 2023.
