The global cybersecurity workforce is short 3.5 million people with more than 750,000 open roles in the U.S. alone. Even government agencies like CISA are cutting budgets and staff. Yet despite having fewer hands on deck, most teams are seeing more threats, not fewer: 72% of CISOs say the volume of attacks has increased in the past year.
On top of this, the average enterprise now runs 130 security tools at once. Instead of clarity, teams face complexity. And instead of confidence, they face fatigue.
This isn’t just a staffing or budget issue. It’s a strategy problem. Teams don’t need more tools – they need to get more from what they already have.
Start With the Threat, Not the Tool
Security strategies too often begin with technology: a new tool, a new dashboard, a new capability that promises better coverage. In fact, security spending has climbed from 8.6 percent to 13 percent of total IT budgets over the past five years. But when teams lead with tools instead of threats, they end up managing noise, not risk.
To break the cycle, teams need to flip the model. Start by identifying the actual threats your organization faces whether it’s phishing, ransomware, a specific seen in the wild campaign, or something else entirely. Then map those threats to your existing controls. What’s covered? What’s redundant? Where are the blind spots?
This threat-to-control mapping gives teams a clearer picture of what matters and reveals where their stack is working against them by creating alert fatigue, friction, or false confidence.
Action step: Build or refresh your threat model, then align each major security control to a specific tactic or technique you’re trying to defend against. If you can’t draw a clear line from tool to threat, it’s time to reassess. Then take it a step further: map coverage and (mis)configurations to each control. That extra layer of visibility is where real differentiation happens.
Once teams have mapped their controls to real threats, the next challenge is scale. Doing this once is helpful. Operationalizing it across dozens, or hundreds, of tools is where the real value lies.
Continuous threat exposure management helps make that possible. It brings visibility into how well your existing controls align to the threats you’ve identified, across your entire environment. Instead of switching between platforms or managing tools in isolation, teams can get a unified, up-to-date view of what’s covered, what’s misconfigured, what’s vulnerable, and where critical gaps remain.
That kind of clarity is often what separates a near miss from a major breach. In many attacks, the defenses needed to stop the threat were already in place, but they weren’t actively managed, tuned to the threat, or surfaced in time to take action. Continuous threat exposure management helps organizations move from passive coverage to active assurance.
Cut Complexity Before You Cut Headcount
Once you’ve mapped your controls to real threats, chances are some tools won’t hold up. But that doesn’t mean you start slashing immediately. Cutting tools without a plan can create more gaps than it closes.
130 tools means 130 places to look when something goes wrong. It also means siloed data, duplicated capabilities, and wasted time switching between systems. Simplifying the environment starts with identifying where effort and value don’t align: where are teams spending the most time for the least impact?
Instead of slashing budgets or downsizing blindly, organizations should invest in rationalizing workflows: assess the ROI of each security tool, maximize their coverage and optimize their effectiveness.
Action step: Rationalize your tool stack based on deployment, configurations and vulnerabilities. What tools are not covering key assets? What tools are not properly configured? Which capabilities do I actually have but I don’t use?
Prove Impact with Clarity, Not Scale
Boards and business leaders want to know: are we safer? Security teams need to answer that question without defaulting to more spend or more dashboards.
That means shifting the conversation from “how many alerts we closed” to “what threats we prevented.” The sheer volume of activity – escalations, scans, detections – doesn’t reflect effectiveness. Clear, outcome-driven metrics tied to threat reduction give teams the leverage to defend their strategies, secure budgets, and avoid reactive investments.
But proving impact requires a language the business understands. Rather than overreporting on technical activity – like alert counts or log volume – security leaders should focus on the risks they’ve actually reduced, their preparedness to real threats, and how coverage is evolving.
What this looks like in practice:
- % of MITRE ATT&CK techniques actively covered
- Increased effectiveness of security controls – in terms of coverage, configurations and vulnerabilities
- Reduction in overlapping or underutilized tools
- Ratio of preventive to reactive spending across the security budget
These kinds of metrics help leadership see what matters: how controls are closing gaps, reducing exposure, and improving resilience over time. They also give CISOs a stronger position when making hard decisions: what to streamline, where to invest, and how to stay focused under pressure.
Fewer tools and people, less security debt: these aren’t signs of weakness. If what remains is strategic and measurable, it’s a sign of maturity. In a constrained environment, clarity is the new scale and the best-performing teams will be those who can show exactly how they’re defending what matters most.
Action step: Identify three metrics your team reports on today that measure activity, and replace them with metrics that measure impact, specifically tied to threat mitigation, dwell time, or risk reduction. Bring those to your next board or budget discussion.
The Bottom Line
Security teams don’t need more tools, more dashboards, or more noise. They more than likely have what they already need and simply need to make it effective.
In a landscape defined by resource constraints and rising threats, the strongest programs won’t be the most complex, they’ll be the most aligned. Aligned to the threat landscape. Aligned to what actually reduces risk. Aligned to metrics that matter.
Resilience today isn’t about scaling up. It’s about stripping away what doesn’t serve a purpose and doubling down on what does.
About the Author
Shai Mendel, Co-Founder & CTO, Nagomi Security, brings over a decade of deep technical expertise and leadership experience in cybersecurity. He began his career as a software engineer and researcher in the Prime Minister’s Office, where he worked for six years, contributing to high-level national security projects.
Shai’s entrepreneurial journey took off when he joined XM Cyber as the first engineer, where he played a pivotal role in building the product from the ground up. As the company’s first Engineering Manager, Shai also spent 25% of his time in customer-facing roles, ensuring that the product aligned with real-world needs and solving complex cybersecurity challenges.
Later, Shai joined Snyk to build its second product focusing on Containers and Kubernetes security. Starting as an Engineering Manager and later advancing to Director of Engineering, he grew his team to dozens of engineers and architects, directly contributing to approximately 20% of Snyk’s revenue at the time.
Shai holds an M.Sc. in Computer Science from Tel Aviv University, and his technical acumen, combined with his leadership product development, drives Nagomi’s mission to deliver innovative effective cybersecurity solutions.
Shai can be reached online at LinkedIn and at our company website https://nagomisecurity.com/.
