Building resilience with cybersecurity business intelligence

Despite increasing investment in cybersecurity, organisations continue to experience more breaches. This paradox reveals that more spending doesn’t necessarily lead to better outcomes.

The sheer volume of data and the rapid pace of change in today’s threat landscape make it difficult for security teams to accurately assess risk or demonstrate the value of their investments.

To overcome these challenges, cybersecurity business intelligence (CSBI) must be the foundation of any security program. It uses data organisations already collect to give clear, practical insights about their specific threat landscape, helping cybersecurity leaders make more informed decisions.

This evidence-based first principles approach also helps identify systemic weaknesses, optimise resource allocation and strengthen resilience against cyber threats.

Gartner predicts organisations with a CSBI capability will demonstrate 50% better proactive breach prevention capabilities than their peers by 2028. Those that fail to take this path risk remaining stuck in reactive or fragmented approaches, ultimately increasing exposure to operational disruption and eroding confidence in the effectiveness of their security program.

Meaningful insights

By converting raw cybersecurity data into meaningful insights about how people, processes and technology are deployed, cybersecurity programs will be better grounded in reality, responsive to change and optimised for resilience.

CSBI uses data already collected from sources such as vulnerability and exposure management, IT service management, identity and access management, threat detection solutions and risk assessments. This information is transformed into strategic intelligence that informs better decision making across the business.

Rather than stopping at immediate actions like patching vulnerabilities or containing threats, these findings can be refined into business-relevant insights, helping identify cybersecurity coverage gaps for workforce planning or training needs. It also helps determine whether platform consolidation or vendor diversification is most effective, and whether investments are meeting expectations across the program. Organisations can also prioritise attack surface reduction.

AI-enabled analytics

Partnering with internal business intelligence teams can accelerate CSBI adoption by leveraging existing organisational skills and tooling. Cybersecurity leaders can then build on established analytics and business intelligence capabilities, ensuring a more efficient and cost-effective transition.

Applying AI capabilities further enhances how data is analysed and visualised. Mountains of performance data can be transformed into a single accurate view of an organisation’s unique threat landscape. This enables progress to be regularly reviewed against key metrics, such as reduced resolution times for critical incidents or improved detection rates earlier in the attack chain.

Using AI-powered business analytic tools helps create useful insights for organisations to deliver better, faster decisions.

Evidence-based approach

Most threat intelligence tools track only a few hundred threat actors. In reality, each organisation is exposed to just a subset of these, which rely on a relatively small set of attack behaviours, such as exploiting vulnerabilities and abusing identities as their primary methods of compromise. CSBI enables organisations to align their defences with this reality by taking a targeted, evidence-based approach.

To build resilient cybersecurity programs, threat actor intent and behavioural patterns must be embedded directly into program design, to ensure controls are calibrated with real-world risks. Every decision about people, process and technology can then be informed by the specific threats facing the business.

It’s important to identify which adversaries are most relevant to the organisation, then understand how they operate and what motivates them, even as motivations such as financial gain remain constant. Cybersecurity leaders can then effectively prioritise controls based on actual risk exposure, validate their effectiveness in practice and ensure initiatives are aligned with broader business objectives.

Shift to a business mindset

CSBI empowers cybersecurity leaders to shift from static, non-evidence-based metrics to outcome-driven measures that are tailored to their unique threat landscape.

To clearly articulate how cyber threats directly influence enterprise risk posture, executive reporting, key risk indicator dashboards and targeted value narratives supported by CSBI insights can guide them. This will demonstrate how cybersecurity investments reduce exposure and bolster resilience, showing defensible ROI and positioning cybersecurity as a strategic business function, not just a cost centre.

*Craig Lawson is a VP analyst at Gartner focused on infrastructure security, security operations and cyber risk. He will be speaking at the upcoming Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit in Sydney, 16-17 March 2026.

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