The world of IT has become more complex over the years. If you've ever wondered what IT god you aggravated for cybersecurity to be thrown into the mix and become ever-increasing in priority and complexity, you aren’t alone. There always seems to be some new exploit tactic popping up, new acronyms to be defined, or redefined, and new products to protect your business against new vulnerabilities. How do they all apply to you and what should you be focusing on? While each organization is different, here are the cybersecurity lessons we’ve learned over the past year.

One of the most important goals of IT Security, perhaps the most important goal, is to reduce risk. Generally, when we think of IT Security and Cyber Risk, we think of hackers and/or a breach, however, a security breach is just one risk element. Cyber risk includes the risk of financial loss, disruption to business, or damage to the reputation of an organization due to some sort of failure of its information technology systems. It can also come from many different sources, such as environmental factors, under-staffing, under-funding, lack of processes and procedures, misaligned processes and policies, equipment failure, and breaches. Being able to fully understand what risk is present and determine the best way to mitigate that risk is a significant challenge to any organization. This often leads to a security solution compounding your risk, rather than mitigating it. Here are two common ways we’ve seen security solutions increase an organization’s risk.

Cybersecurity professionals need to be fairly agile to maintain the juggling act between preventing a breach, staying compliant and keeping cost manageable. Many organizations are challenged to focus on security or raise the maturity level of the existing security program as the frequency of attacks increase.

Practice makes perfect. There’s no greater example of this than the Olympics, where athletes like Simone Biles spent countless hours practicing to execute their craft perfectly. But even Simone Biles, who is arguably the greatest gymnast, didn’t receive a single perfect score and faltered on the balance beam. That’s because the phrase, no matter how motivating, is misleading.