The Most Expensive Cybersecurity Decision
Do you know the single most expensive cybersecurity decision in most organizations?
Cutting corners.
Every organization faces pressure to move faster, spend less, and "be practical" about security. This leads to corners quietly getting cut at the sake of organizational safeguards.
A control rollout gets delayed.
An exception gets approved "temporarily”—but never gets revisited.
A cleanup task gets pushed to next quarter.
None of these decisions feel reckless in the moment. They feel reasonable—until they aren't.
The sneaky thing is that cutting corners rarely looks like negligence.
Cybersecurity failures don't usually come from willful disregard. They come from compromise.
"We'll enforce MFA later."
"That legacy system can't support it."
"We'll review those accounts next quarter."
"We don't have time to tune alerts right now."
Individually, these decisions seem harmless. Collectively, they create fragile environments that only appear secure. The danger isn't a single corner being cut, it's how many stay cut at the same time.
The Illusion of Short-Term Savings
When security investments are delayed or reduced, organizations often believe they're saving money. What they're really doing is:
Increasing response costs
Extending dwell time
Compounding recovery effort
Amplifying regulatory and legal exposure
Security spend is visible, but the cost to remediate an incident is astronomically more at the bottom line. And the thing is: the organizations hit hardest by incidents are rarely the ones with no security, they're the ones with partially implemented security. Not following through with best practices is may save money in the short term, but it is incredibly costly in the long run.
Where Corner-Cutting Shows Up First
In real-world environments, cutting corners usually shows up in the same places:
Identity controls that exist but aren't enforced consistently
Exceptions that never expire or get reviewed
Inactive users and devices that quietly retain access
Monitoring tools that generate alerts no one owns
Response plans that look good on paper but haven't been exercised
These aren't advanced failures. They're operational ones. And attackers know it. Most major incidents start in one of these five places.
Attackers exploit convenience, not perfection.
Threat actors don't look for perfect victims, they look for:
The one account without MFA
The service account no one watches
The endpoint that stopped checking in
The alert that fires but never escalates
They succeed not because security is missing, but because it's uneven.
Smart security is about tradeoffs, not shortcuts
Good security leaders understand tradeoffs are unavoidable. But there is a difference between intentional risk decisions and unowned shortcuts that accumulate over time.
An informed risk is governance—but unrestrained corner cutting is entropy.
What To Do Instead of Compromising
Instead of asking, "What can we cut?" ask, "What corners have we already cut and never revisited?"
Overlooked vulnerabilities is the real risk to your organization lives—the cost to your finances and resources is too much to overlook.
So, if you only do one thing this quarter, do this:
1. Audit all open security exceptions. Review every active exception, verify it's still necessary, and either renew it with an expiration date, remediate the underlying issue, or close it. Most organizations discover 20-30% of exceptions can be eliminated immediately.
2. Set a hard deadline to eliminate accounts without MFA. Identify every account lacking multi-factor authentication and assign a remediation date. This single control eliminates most initial compromise vectors.
3. Own your alerts. For each monitoring tool generating alerts, confirm who owns response. Unowned alerts are the same as disabled alerts.
Cybersecurity rarely fails because teams don't care. It fails when convenience quietly overrides discipline. The most expensive security decision isn't buying the wrong tool. It's convincing yourself that a temporary shortcut won't matter later. Before setting new goals, spend one working session identifying the "temporary" security shortcuts that never got reversed and either own them as risk or close them. Because eventually, those shortcuts always catch up with you.