Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) is the foundation of a secure and accountable IT infrastructure. It refers to the practices that ensure your organization stays secure, meets regulatory requirements, and minimizes operational risks. For organizations running on Active Directory, the stakes are even higher. One misconfigured permission, one overlooked stale account, or one unchecked access path can open the door to breaches, privilege escalation, or audit failures.

Let’s get this out of the way: the term vulnerability management has always been misleading. It evokes the idea that we’re wrangling a tidy list of software flaws, checking boxes, patching holes, and keeping things humming. But anyone who’s worked in the trenches or tried to explain this chaos to an executive board knows the truth. What we call “vulnerability management” isn’t a single discipline, or even a well-contained function.

Security teams are familiar with the comforting sense of safety that comes from utilizing security controls like Single sign-on (SSO) providers to manage their organization’s major applications and critical tools. When these applications are routed through Okta, Azure AD, or other identity providers, your SaaS environment can seem managed and accounted for. But lurking underneath is a significant vulnerability: the SSO blind spot.

Ransomware activity continues to increase, and Bitsight data illustrates the scale of this growth. In our State of the Underground 2025 report, Bitsight TRACE observed a nearly 25% rise in unique ransomware victims publicly listed on leak sites. Additionally, the number of leak sites operated by ransomware groups grew by 53%.

In today’s environment—marked by accelerating threats like ransomware, increasingly complex supply chains, and the growing footprint of AI and IoT—managing cyber risk has never been more urgent or more difficult. Our latest research with Sapio Research, The State of Cyber Risk and Exposure 2025, draws on the insights of 1,000 cybersecurity and cyber risk leaders around the world to understand what they are focused on today and what will be keeping them up tomorrow.

Cybersecurity leaders in the UK are facing a stark reality: managing cyber risk is becoming significantly harder. Not only are threats growing in scale and complexity, but a lack of visibility into digital exposures—both internal and across the supply chain—is compounding the challenge.

‍ ‍Risk managers have long used registers to keep track of and manage the threats their organizations face, and, as cyber risk emerged in the 21st century as one of the core market concerns, cybersecurity leaders, too, started to harness these tools to structure and prioritize their cyber-related exposure. However, while risk registers offer a starting point for this process, many have not evolved beyond their early design, remaining static qualitative inventories.