CISOs today are under a perfect storm of pressures: rapidly expanding digital environments, demands to demonstrate ROI on past security investments and an ongoing shortage of skilled talent. At the same time, organizations are turning to automation and artificial intelligence (AI) to close gaps and improve efficiency. But these technologies can only succeed if built on a reliable foundation of accurate data.

In this conversation, Ryan Knisley, Chief Product Strategist at Axonius, shares insights from his daily discussions with CISOs on how security leaders are balancing these pressures while working to strengthen resilience and reduce risk.

First, the scale and complexity of the digital environment. Almost every company today isn’t just adopting digital—they are inherently digital businesses with rapidly expanding digital landscapes. Cloud infrastructure, applications, connected devices, and data footprints are growing exponentially, outpacing the ability of cybersecurity programs to keep up.

In parallel, budgets for cybersecurity saw significant increases in 2020, 2021, and even into 2022. A few years on from those investments, CFOs and other business leaders are looking for evidence that those dollars have translated into real maturity gains. This dynamic has created rising expectations to demonstrate ROI, yet CISOs often find program maturity struggling to keep pace.

That mismatch can create friction at the leadership level and lead to increased scrutiny, frustration, and ongoing pressure to show tangible cybersecurity advancements in a digital environment that keeps growing more complex.

This challenge is reflected in recent research showing that while 81% of organizations feel prepared to manage critical vulnerabilities, it still takes them more than 24 hours to remediate them, leaving wide-open windows of risk. Nearly a third say they struggle with prioritization and risk assessment, and 27% cite a lack of integration between tools as a core blocker to timely response.

Next, CISOs face significant pressure around tool and platform consolidation. Many organizations historically have adopted a “shiny object” approach to cybersecurity, acquiring numerous best-of-breed tools that each address a specific threat or function.

Over time, this approach has created sprawling and overly complex cybersecurity environments. Rather than reducing risk, these fragmented toolsets expand the attack surface of their asset architecture without the proper security controls, making the tech stack more vulnerable.

CISOs today are under pressure to simplify and rationalize their cybersecurity stack to reduce complexity, improve efficiency, and, ultimately, decrease risk. This involves standardizing on fewer, more comprehensive platforms and maximizing their capabilities rather than maintaining numerous overlapping tools at partial utilization.

Last, but certainly not least, talent remains one of the most difficult challenges CISOs face. Traditionally, cybersecurity teams have tried to address the growing demands by simply adding more human resources. However, the cybersecurity talent market is highly competitive, and there are simply not enough skilled professionals to meet the growing demand.

Budget constraints have also limited headcount growth for most cybersecurity teams. CISOs must therefore shift strategies, leveraging automation, artificial intelligence, and other advanced technologies to alleviate the burden on their teams.

However, AI and automation can only go so far without the right foundation. Many organizations (42%) want to automate patching, and 40% hope to leverage AI for smarter risk prioritization but are discovering that their confidence in their security posture is based on incomplete or outdated data.

Without a reliable, up-to-date view of assets and exposures, even the best AI models can misfire, introducing new risks instead of mitigating them. Building trust in data accuracy is becoming a prerequisite for truly proactive security strategies.

This focus frees cybersecurity professionals from mundane, repetitive tasks, enabling them to focus on meaningful, higher-value work, an essential factor in employee retention, satisfaction, and long-term workforce development.