Managing cyber risk has become significantly more difficult for most cybersecurity leaders compared to five years ago. This is largely because of rapid growth in AI-driven attacks, ransomware, and expanding digital attack surfaces across cloud, IoT, and complex supply chains.
A large majority of cybersecurity leaders report that visibility into their own environments and third-party ecosystems remains incomplete. This limits their ability to see exposed assets, understand how threats map to those assets, and prioritize response activities based on business impact.
Continuous monitoring has moved to the top of the security investment agenda, yet only a minority of organizations are able to monitor both internal systems and third-party relationships on an ongoing basis. This leaves substantial gaps in detection and oversight of vendor-related risk.
Source: https://www.bitsight.com/blog/top-challenges-facing-cybersecurity-leaders-2025-survey
Commentary
In the above source, being able to "threat map" is important for lowering risk.
Threat mapping is the process of identifying who might attack your organization, what they might target, and how they are most likely to get in.
In other words, threat mapping translates technical risk into everyday exposures: the systems you use, the data you manage, and the behaviors that open doors to attackers.
When an organization maps threats, it connects specific business processes -such as handling payments, accessing customer records, or working remotely - to the cyber threats that could disrupt them. This makes it possible to see which activities create the most risk and which controls, such as training, approvals, or verification steps, matter most.
When staff know how their roles fit into the threat map, they are more likely to recognize suspicious requests, resist social engineering, and report incidents quickly.
The final takeaway is that effective threat mapping reduces the likelihood that a cyber event turns into a financial loss, regulatory violation, or reputational crisis. It helps everyone in the organization see that protecting information is not just an IT issue, but also a shared responsibility.
