As per Gartner®, “Most non-executive directors (NEDs) lack confidence in cybersecurity value. According to the 2026 Gartner Board of Directors Survey, 90% of NEDs do not believe cybersecurity currently delivers the right level of protection or spends the correct amount of money. But CIOs and CISOs can adopt new behaviors to change this.”*

The report suggests that the most effective leaders bridge this gap by becoming “Cybersecurity Sense-Makers”—translating complex technical details into a business-centric context. They shift conversations from fear to function, positioning cybersecurity not as a cost center, but as a strategic business enabler. Achieving this requires a new approach built on three pillars: simplifying complexity, speaking with candor, and aligning with business value.

This is where Skyhawk Security’s Autonomous Purple Team becomes a CISO’s most powerful ally. Our platform is engineered to provide the exact evidence-based insights needed to master these three pillars and transform boardroom conversations from skeptical interrogations into strategic, collaborative partnerships.

The Crisis of Noise: Why Traditional Security Fails the Boardroom Test

One of the biggest challenges a security leader faces is the overwhelming volume of alert noise. It’s not uncommon for security teams to be staring at a backlog of many alerts from their security tools. This creates an untenable situation. It makes a breach all but inevitable, with post-incident analysis often concluding which vulnerability was the root cause of the breach but left of the boom, the sheer volume of alerts makes finding what matters a search for a needle in the haystack and render most remediation efforts ineffective, further eroding confidence and increasing risk.

Additionally, just saying, “We resolved 200 alerts last week”, is not helpful. The next question from the board will be, “So does that mean we are secure?”. The CISO cannot answer this question on alerts alone.

This is one of the core problems that Skyhawk Security was built to solve. Instead of adding to the noise, we cut through it. Security teams up-level their focus to remediate what truly reduces cloud risk by showing a decrease in threats to valuable business assets.

Simplify Complexity with an Adversarial View

To build confidence, CISOs must present a clear, contextualized view of risk. Skyhawk’s Autonomous Purple Team makes this possible by providing an inherently candid, adversarial view of your cloud environment. It shows you exactly how an attacker could succeed, revealing the critical gaps in your defenses that are buried in the noise.

This allows you to shift the narrative from control maturity to proven protection levels. Instead of saying, “Our firewall is 95% configured,” you can confidently state, “We have validated that our current security controls would successfully detect and block an attacker attempting to access our production database via this specific path.” By continuously simulating attacks, our platform provides evidence-based proof of your security posture, demonstrating the tangible value of your security investments in preventing actual breaches.

 Effectively Manage Cloud Risk

Presenting problems without solutions creates anxiety. The board needs to see a strategic plan, not just a crisis report. Skyhawk’s platform excels at this by upleveling alerts and security details, into a comprehensive view of cloud risk reduction. There will never be zero alerts. However, if you show you have plan a and plan b in place to manage these alerts, you give the board confidence that business risk is effectively managed.

Skyhawk Security has a two-part plan to manage risk.

  • First, Skyhawk prioritizes exposures based on the business value of the at-risk asset. The security team knows what to focus on to protect crown jewels.
  • Second, detection and runbooks reduce MTTR to further reduce cloud risk. If there is a threat actor in your cloud, they will be detected and stopped in their tracks – fast.

With Skyhawk, the conversation changes to: “Here is our two-part prevention strategy and how we are effectively managing risk across the cloud and the business.”

Skyhawk Transforms the CISO to the Sense-Maker

The CISO needs to be the security Sense-Maker. In order to do this effectively, they need tools that help them take security signals and data and create valuable insights so they can effectively manage cloud risk. Skyhawk Security does this by analyzing multiple feeds from your CNAPP, cloud-native security tools, SIEM, and more, and transforms this into the weaponization of vulnerabilities and exposures, security control validation, and overall protection readiness to manage business risk.

A key offering from Skyhawk that CISOs can use for sense-making is the Purple Team Assessment. The report details weaponized exposures and prioritizes vulnerabilities not just by technical severity, but by their potential business impact and the effectiveness of each remediation step. For example, it highlights how fixing a single security issue can eliminate dozens of different attack vectors. This provides a clear, evidence-based narrative of risk reduction.

 

Figure 1: Over time, CISOs and security leaders can present to the rest of the leadership team and prove to them that cloud risk is being reduced.

Skyhawk Security empowers the CISO to be the sense-maker with visual representations and documented evidence that offer undeniable proof  to the board and senior leadership that your security team is effectively managing cloud risk and there is a positive return on investment for their security solutions.

Check out the Purple Team Assessment.

Or, try the product completely free for 30 days!

*Gartner subscribers can read the full report at www.gartner.com.

Gartner, How to Increase Board Confidence in Cybersecurity Value, 2025 by Kristin Moyer, Christopher Mixter, Published December 22, 2025.

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