The Journey from Maturity to Cyber Resilience

By Mike Saxton, CRO, MyCISO

In the cybersecurity domain, many organisations stop at compliance, work toward maturity, and then get stuck. But real resilience demands more: moving beyond “we do the things” to “we do the right things consistently, measurably, economically”. In my view that means two further stages: Coverage and Efficiency. At MyCISO we’re actively living that journey—and I’ll weave our story in to show how, at the granular control level, metrics and integration matter.

The four-stage Cyber Resilience scale

It helps to frame the terrain before we dig into the jump from Maturity to Coverage/Efficiency.

1. Compliance – You meet the baseline regulatory or industry requirements. You have policies, controls, regular audits. It’s necessary, but alone it’s passive and reactive.
2. Maturity – Your controls are partially institutionalised. You have repeatable processes: risk assessments, control frameworks, internal audits, documented and measured. You’ve moved from “we’re doing it ad-hoc” to “we’re doing it on a schedule, to defined standards”.
3. Coverage – You have mapped the full landscape: assets, control points, threat surfaces, dependencies. You’re measuring how much of your environment is instrumented, protected, monitored, responded-to, recovered from. You’re closing the blind spots.
4. Efficiency – You’re optimised: control activities are tuned for cost / benefit / risk; you automate where possible; you integrate tooling so you minimise wasted cycles; you shift left; you view security outcomes the way the business views them (risk mitigated per dollar, time to recover, mean-time to detect).

So the meaningful leap is from Maturity → Coverage + Efficiency. Let’s make that explicit.

What it takes to shift from Maturity into Coverage

When you’ve reached Maturity, you’re doing the right things. But often you’re still operating in a silo-control mindset: “We have policies, reviews, patching, detection, etc.” The move to Coverage means you ask:

• Do we know all the assets and dependencies that need controls? Can we map everything that matters (people, cloud, SaaS, edge, remote, 3rd parties)?
• Do we have visibility across all those assets – including shadow IT, SaaS, endpoints, OT, remote users?
• Are our controls applied consistently? Are there parts of the organisation where protections are weaker (geographies, business units, acquisitions) because we just apply the standard controls in the “core” but forget the periphery?
• Are we measuring control execution and control failure (exceptions, deviations, gaps)? Beyond “we have patching” to “X% of critical assets are patched within Y hours,” “X% of endpoints report health status,” “X% of SaaS have MFA enabled,” etc.
• Do we test the controls end-to-end (scenario-based, adversary emulation, red-team/blue-team) to confirm the coverage is working — not just that the control exists, but that it actually holds when attacked?
• Have we covered our third-party / supply-chain dependencies and external integrations? Blind spots here are the most typical coverage failure.
• Do we monitor the control gaps → incidents linkage such that if a gap exists, you can see it in your incident/failure reporting and can prioritise closing the gap?

In short, Coverage means no more “hope the controls are enough” — you move to “we know how much of our environment is protected, monitored, tested, and resilient.” It’s about turning the organisational control framework into actual coverage metrics.

And then moving from Coverage into Efficiency

Once you’ve got visibility and measurement of coverage, doing it in a heavy, manual, reactive, expensive way is still sub-optimal. Efficiency means paring waste, automating, integrating, and aligning to business outcomes:

• Are we automating detection, response, remediation where possible (so we’re not waiting for tickets, spreadsheets, delays)?
• Are we integrating toolsets so we avoid duplication of effort (e.g., endpoint, SaaS, cloud logs all feeding into a unified platform, rather than separate siloes)?
• Are we using metrics that matter to the business — mean-time to detect (MTTD), mean-time to remediate (MTTR), percentage of users protected, cost per incident, risk exposure per dollar spent — rather than generic “control was executed” measures?
• Are we prioritising controls by business-impact rather than by “we’ve always done this”? That means focusing your resources on the high-risk/high-value assets, and avoiding “spray and pray” across everything.
• Do we have feedback loops so control failures drive root-cause improvements, not just fix-and-forget? Are metrics used to tune controls on a recurring basis?
• Are we measuring efficiency i.e., cost of control per unit risk reduction, or control activity hours per incident mitigated? Are we tracking control drift or decay and proactively addressing it?
• Are we continuously optimising the control portfolio: retiring outdated controls, consolidating overlapping ones, scaling up what works, scaling down what doesn’t, leveraging proportionate controls rather than one-size-fits-all?

Efficiency, at the end of the day, means you’re doing enough to manage risk, but not more than necessary and you’re doing it in a streamlined, integrated way so that security doesn’t become a drag or a cost burden but an enabler.

MyCISO’s story: granular control level, metrics + integration

At MyCISO our tag line is Security Simplified, so we aim to live this journey. A few specifics:

• We are always integrating best-in-class tools such as CrowdStrike Falcon (endpoint detection and response) and ServiceNow (workflow, service management) into a unified control fabric. The goal: endpoint activity, SaaS shifts, identity events, cloud posture changes all feed into one operational dashboard rather than separate consoles.
• At the granular control level we are defining metrics like: “% of endpoints with active EDR agent reporting in the last X hours”, “% of critical alerts triggered by CrowdStrike that received ServiceNow triage/resolution within Y minutes”, “% of SaaS accounts with anomalous login behaviour, flagged and remediated automatically”, “time from detection to containment to remediation for major incidents”.
• We’re mapping end-to-end workflows: from sensor → detection → alert → workflow via ServiceNow → remediation → verification → closure. That ensures not just coverage but resolution.
• Additionally, we are aligning these metrics to business risk exposure: e.g., identifying the high-value endpoints, or Crown-Jewel Assets (finance, IP, customer data) and tracking their protective posture (EDR health, patch status, identity risk) as a separate category. That means we are not scoring every endpoint equally — we weigh by business-impact.
• On efficiency we’re monitoring: “hours spent by security operations on manual triage per 100 alerts”, “percentage of alerts that are false positives / required investigation / required action”, “cost per incident responded”, “percentage of controls in manual vs. automated mode”. The aim: reduce manual burden and increase resolution speed with minimal overhead.
• We built a "Critical Supplier" process (for one of our key Suppliers Customers) so we can standardise metrics, integrate vendor performance into their controls and dashboards, and continuously optimise how they engage with their Cown-Jewels Suppliers.
• We’re embedding feedback loops: every time an alert-to-remediate workflow shows a bottleneck (for example, alert not triaged for too long, endpoint agent offline, manual investigation high cost) that triggers control tuning: maybe increase automation, adjust sensor coverage, reduce alert volume by refining rules, segment more aggressively. That’s Efficiency in action.

Why this matters and what the board / executive care about

• Boards and executives don’t care about “we have 95% patch compliance”. They care about “how fast we detect a breach”, “how quickly we recover”, “what risk we still carry”, “how much we spend vs. value”. The move into Coverage and Efficiency enables you to speak in that language.
• If you stop at Maturity you will still have blind spots, siloed controls, inefficient processes and you will be unable to scale or optimise.
• If you don’t measure business-impact, you cannot prioritise properly, and you won’t get buy-in for purposeful investment in controls.
• Efficiency means you won’t keep adding headcount or licences forever you’ll escalate your resilience without linear growth in cost.
• Coverage and Efficiency together make resilience repeatable, predictable and justifiable to stakeholders (risk committees, audit, board) and that is how security becomes a business enabler, not just a cost centre.

Call to action

If you’re leading a cyber programme and you’re reading this:

• Stop asking “are we mature?” and start asking “what % of our environment is covered, and how efficiently are we operating?”
• Map your controls to assets, map your metrics to business outcomes, map your workflows through detection → response → recovery.
• Lean into integration: sensors → detection → workflow → remediation. Avoid manual siloes.
• Report up: show time-to-detect, time-to-contain, time-to-recover, cost per incident, controls automated vs. manual.
• Continuously review: retire what doesn’t work, automate more, refine alerts, optimise coverage.

Final word

Moving from Maturity to Coverage and Efficiency is the pivot from “we’re doing the right things” to “we’re doing the right things right, across the full attack surface, and in a cost-effective way”. At MyCISO we’re on that journey, integrating tools like CrowdStrike and ServiceNow to deliver granular control, unified metrics and feedback loops that scale. If you want to talk through how to shape your metric-and-integration strategy, happy to connect.