Balancing User Experience with Security: A New Frontier for CISOs in Minimizing Business Risk Exposure

The security team has often been seen as the department of “no.” It’s somewhat understandable why this reputation has emerged - every security change can seem like it slows down productivity.  But should that really be the case?

The following scenario has become all too real for organizations around the world.

• Business development: “We want to enter a new market.” 
• Network team: “Great, we’ll expand our IT footprint.” 
• Security team: “Actually, no. That’s a risk we can’t afford right now.”

We all know what happens next. The business development team takes it upon itself to plunk down a company credit card, provision a new Amazon Web Services (AWS) instance in the new region and move forward with the aggressive growth opportunity without the buy-in or support from security. Over the next couple of months, the opportunity grows and evolves in a silo with minimal (if any) patching, policy management or other regular maintenance. Eventually, one of two things happens: the un- or under- secured environment is compromised, or an audit uncovers the rogue IT and unleashes a major backlash that shuts down or severely limits the initiative.

It's clear that security isn’t – and never will be – frictionless to users. Every new policy is intended to interfere in some process or interaction that malicious actors may be able to exploit to do harm. The unintended result is that users may find workarounds or willfully ignore security policies to maintain productivity. In that case, no one wins.

CISOs today are reshaping how security integrates into the business, making it a facilitator of secure, sustainable growth. Their constant challenge? To guide their organizations toward innovative solutions without compromising security or impacting productivity.

Adaptive Security: Smart Security for Smarter Business 

The pressure to innovate in today’s competitive business environment doesn’t have to increase risk. Adaptive security models offer a middle ground. Rather than applying rigid, one-size-fits-all policies, adaptive security tailors controls based on context—focusing on the user, application, location, or data in question. By embracing adaptive security, teams gain the flexibility to respond dynamically to real-time risk assessments, applying policies selectively to specific traffic—whether by application, user, location, or other criteria.

For example, imagine your sales team needs to access sensitive customer data while traveling. With adaptive security, we don’t have to lock them out entirely if they’re logging in from another country. Adaptive security allows the security team to say “yes” without sacrificing safety. 

3 Ways to Bring Adaptive Security Into Your Organization 

1. Know Your Attack Surface Inside and Out

Adaptive security starts with awareness of your IT environment. While it’s critical that security teams understand the organization’s attack surface, security teams also need to know the context in which individual components operate towards achieving business goals. For example, how will an outage of the organization’s CRM system impact sales? Or what is the consequence of email going down for an hour or two? This awareness allows security teams to better balance usability and security by prioritizing risk. A vulnerability in a non-critical application may not be worth shutting down if it doesn’t have much impact on business continuity. Context is king. 

2. Automate Compliance and Governance

Security teams can make compliance far less of a burden, by taking a risk-based approach rather than simply marking off a checklist, while ensuring governance is applied against normal user behavior. Allowing your policy enforcement engine to learn normal behavior and flag abnormalities eliminates the manual processing of policy exceptions. This reduces strain on the security team, allowing them to focus on what matters, as well as minimizing any potential user disruption.

3. Preemptive Hardening to Reduce Risk

Automation can also be used to proactively detect and remediate vulnerabilities in the organization’s IT infrastructure. This preemptive approach reduces the attack surface, prevents attacks from occurring, stops them from spreading and avoids any disruption to business operations. This approach lowers the chance of a security incident; by automatically remediating low-hanging fruit so analysts can focus on the higher priority events

From ‘No’ to ‘Know’ 

Implementing stringent security controls doesn’t have to come at the expense of productivity. By embracing adaptive security, CISOs and their teams can create a safer, more flexible environment where security enables business growth instead of standing in its way. With the right adaptive security strategy, you are addressing the challenge to turn security into a strategic partner that understands the business, adapts to its needs, and keeps things secure without slowing anyone down. That’s the kind of win-win situation everyone expects.

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Learn how Bitdefender's GravityZone Platform uses adaptive security to balance user experience with robust protection.