AI is breaking the prevention first mindset: Why rapid recovery now matters more than ever

For most of my career as a CISO, the cyber industry seemed to operate on a simple and largely unchallenged assumption. If you invested enough in prevention, serious incidents could be avoided.

Strong perimeter controls, layered defenses, regular patching, and increasingly sophisticated detection tools were seen as the answer. When breaches did happen, they were treated as failures of execution rather than evidence that the model itself was flawed.

This mindset made sense in a different threat environment. Attacks were more linear and often opportunistic. Security teams had time to analyze alerts, escalate concerns, and intervene before attackers reached critical systems. Boards expected certainty, and prevention offered a narrative that was easy to understand and reassuring to fund.