Healthy Security Cultures Thrive on Risk Reporting
Summary
Organisations are shifting from a fear-driven approach to risk towards one that rewards identifying and documenting risks. Security leaders who publicly acknowledge risk and track mitigation progress help create transparency, improve mental health among teams, and build resilience. Experts including Drata CISO Matt Hillary and BitSight CEO Stephen Boyer advocate for living risk-management programmes, risk registries, and embedding a risk-aware mindset from onboarding through board oversight.
The article outlines practical cultural and governance steps: celebrate and document risk-finding, make reporting channels clear, use milestone-driven registries to show progress, and push for more objective, financial-style metrics when reporting to boards. Acceptance of some failure and a focus on resilience — not total avoidance — is now seen as a marker of maturity.
Key Points
- Rewarding risk identification reduces shame and encourages openness, improving team mental health and influence for security leaders.
- A living risk-management programme with continuous threat identification makes mitigation progress visible and actionable.
- Risk registries act as evidence of due diligence and protect CISOs from being unfairly blamed after incidents.
- Embedding risk acceptance and reporting processes in onboarding helps normalise speaking up and speeds remediation.
- Boards must enforce transparency, set risk appetite, and ensure alignment between risk management and business strategy.
- The industry is shifting from pure risk avoidance to resilience, accepting some level of failure while planning for recovery.
- Future progress depends on more objective, quantitative measures of cyber risk that translate into financial terms for boards and CFOs.
Context and Relevance
This piece matters because how organisations handle risk reporting directly affects incident response, governance, and reputational outcomes. As attack surfaces expand and outages become as disruptive as attacks, companies that normalise reporting and measure risk will move faster to remediate issues and justify investment to boards. The article ties operational practices (registries, continuous assessment) to cultural change and governance — a useful link for security leaders seeking practical steps to mature their programmes.
Author note
Punchy takeaway: this isn’t about being soft on security — it’s about being smarter. Celebrate the find, document the fix, show your homework. If you’re responsible for security culture or reporting to the board, the tactical advice here is immediately usable and worth close reading.
Why should I read this?
Because if you want people to actually tell you when something stinks, you need to stop making them scared of being the messenger. This article explains why that shift matters, what to put in place (registries, onboarding, reporting channels) and how it helps when the inevitable incident lands. Quick, practical and helps you stop firefighting in the dark.
Source
Source: https://www.darkreading.com/cyber-risk/healthy-security-cultures-thrive-on-risk-reporting