The corporate security market is estimated by Fortune Business Insights at $113 billion in 2024 and projected to reach $196 billion in 2032. Yet executives and boardrooms sometimes treat this function like a night watchman. This disconnect creates a crisis of relevance for a function that can drive enterprise resilience and support growth and performance.

The paradox is clear. Companies lost over $1 trillion from physical security incidents in 2022. Data breaches cost $4.88 million on average, according to IBM research. Yet the function meant to prevent these losses often can't communicate with the business. As a result, security professionals are at risk of being kept out of the room where key business decisions are made. Crucially, their budgets might face cuts at a time when the threat landscape is complex and evolving rapidly.

Corporate security in many organizations lacks the necessary exposure to the relevant business dynamics. As a result, they can be blindsided by threats that arrive through market shifts or regulations rather than break-ins. This narrow, operational emphasis wastes resources, creates noise and reduces organizational resilience.

Without connection to business strategy, much of an organization’s security spending fails to reach its potential. Security should keep the organization safe while empowering growth and innovation. When security is strategically aligned with business goals, it strengthens risk management and maximizes enterprise value.

For decades, security leaders have come from law enforcement and military backgrounds. Businesses hired military officers in the 1950s, then shifted to ex-law enforcement in the 1970s and 1980s for their investigative skills. Following the growth in the threat from terrorism in the early 2000s and the uncertainty of the COVID pandemic, businesses added intelligence analysts to their ranks.

These professionals excel at securing facilities, running investigations, managing crises, and assessing threats. Their expertise forms the "Art" of security judgment shaped by real-world events.

But this operational focus creates blind spots. Some organizations faced a culture clash, as government-trained security leaders sometimes took a "my way or the highway" approach. They spoke about incidents and protocols, not profit or market share. Surveys show security leaders have an opportunity to strengthen their communication skills, strategic thinking, and business knowledge.

This gap explains why many Chief Security Officers (CSOs) have short tenures. While Fortune 500 Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) average 4.5 years in their roles, some reports show CISO tenures as brief as 18 to 26 months. Four out of five CSOs last less than three years. This turnover disrupts strategy and wastes resources.

The result: security gets sidelined. Many companies see physical and cyber security as a means to achieve compliance — not as business enablers. This gap between business and security goals leads to waste, delayed investments, and slower decision-making.

The stakes are high. Today’s threats converge and amplify each other, demanding more sophisticated leadership that embraces the “Art” of experience alongside the “Science” of data.

A call to action:

• To Current Security Leaders: The game has changed. Your experience is extremely valuable, but needs to be converted to business currency: data, ROI, and measurable value. It’s time to upskill and elevate the industry or we risk becoming obsolete. About 30% of cybersecurity professionals admit their leaders lack business skills. Don't be one of them.

• To the C-Suite: Demand more than vague promises about "keeping bad guys out." Require security to operate as a strategic partner that understands your risk appetite and business goals. Your CSO should be connecting corporate security decisions to EBITDA and risk-adjusted performance.

• To the Industry (ASIS, ISC2): Your work on certifications plays a vital role in helping security professionals demonstrate technical expertise. As the field evolves, there's a growing opportunity to expand such impact by supporting development in business acumen, strategy, and finance. These are the skills that will define the next generation of security leaders.

Security faces a choice: remain a cost center subject to budget pressures for lacking clear value and investment justification, or embrace the art-science blend needed to become a strategic asset.

The future of corporate security won't be decided by the height of its fences, the sophistication of its cameras, or the number of guards at the gate. It will be decided in the P&L statement, the investor briefings, and the strategic planning sessions.

Security teams must adapt to these changes. The good news is that other corporate functions have already done so, oXering a path for security leaders to follow.

 

Corporate security stands at a crossroads. Practitioners with law enforcement and military backgrounds bring valuable experience and expertise to the table. But the function must keep evolving to ensure strategic relevance.

Other business areas, such as IT and Legal, have successfully made the journey from operational specialists to strategic partners. Security must now follow their path, blending operational expertise with business acumen.

The alternative? Being sidelined as businesses seek security leaders who can demonstrate strategic value.

Remember IT's past? It was the department you called to fix email, unjam printers, or explain network outages. IT was widely seen as a support function: a cost center with limited strategic value. Its main focus was to deliver projects on time and within budget.

Look at IT today. It drives transformation and enables business strategy. How? IT leaders transformed from simply delivering technical solutions to becoming true business partners. They began focusing on outcomes that mattered to the broader organization, aligning IT initiatives with strategic goals. Rather than being evaluated solely on cost eXiciency, IT started to demonstrate its impact by enabling business growth, resilience and transformation. This led to a shift in the conversation away from cost to value creation.

Legal departments followed a similar path. Once known as "Dr. No", they highlighted risk and slowed progress, focusing on controlling outside counsel spend. They were often seen as bottlenecks to innovation.

Legal evolved through the introduction of Legal Operations capabilities, which applied business principles to legal management. They embraced data to identify trends and show value. Strategic planning became key, aligning legal activities with company goals and shifting from reactive to proactive risk management. They delegated nonlegal responsibilities, such as data analytics, financial oversight and technology to specialists. As a result, legal professionals could focus on delivering high-value strategic counsel.

Both IT and Legal followed a clear playbook: they professionalized operations, adopted data-driven decisions, improved communication, integrated with corporate strategy, and measured their impact on growth. They earned their seat at the table by showing how they helped create a bigger, more resilient, more profitable business.

This shift wasn't just about new tools; it required a mindset change from service provision to strategic partnership. It took eXort to learn the business and courage to challenge outdated practices. IT and Legal created specialized roles, such as legal operations or IT business analysts, that freed leaders to focus on strategy. Security often lacks this support layer, with Chief Security OXicers expected to be strategist, operator, data expert, and business liaison simultaneously. This needs to change.

Security's path forward means building on its heritage, not discarding it. The future belongs to leaders who can blend the "Art" of experience with the "Science" of data.

The Art remains essential. Security practitioners' experience, intuition, and judgment are irreplaceable. This human element helps navigate complex threats, read situations, understand motivations, and make tough decisions under pressure. This qualitative judgment forms the foundation of eXective security.

But the Art alone doesn't scale or convince budget committees. A Security team that relies exclusively on practical experience is ideally positioned to address imminent threats but at risk of missing other critical challenges.

The Science addresses this gap by translating security into business language: numbers. This involves:

• KPIs that Matter (to the Business): Move beyond "number of patrols" or "incidents responded to." Use metrics that resonate with executives: "reduction in loss rates from specific security investments," "security's contribution to business continuity," "risk reduction per dollar spent," and "security's role in enabling market entry."

• Dashboards that Speak C-Suite: Visual, concise, focused on business impact. Not spreadsheets of raw data, but clear stories about risk, resilience, and return on investment.

• Predictive Analytics: Use data, AI, and machine learning to anticipate threats, identify vulnerabilities, and allocate resources accordingly, not just react to past incidents.

• Financial Acumen: Understand budgets, Return on Investment, cost-benefit analysis, and build compelling business cases for security investments.

This blend creates a new security leader: bilingual and versatile. These new leaders speak both security and business languages, translate threats into business intelligence, and work eXectively in both field assessments and boardroom presentations. Security leaders who blend art and science understand security as part of enterprise risk management and as a business enabler.

This isn't about replacing the experience accumulated by security practitioners. It is about supplementing it with modern business frameworks and tools.

The transformation looks like this:

This blend of art and science requires more than sending security staX to data analytics workshops. It needs a restructured security department with new roles, such as data analysts, program managers, and security strategists similar to how Legal Operations support lawyers or IT business partners bridge technology and business. Field operatives should not be expected to become data scientists overnight. A mature security function needs a diverse team with distinct operational, technical, analytical, and business engagement roles.

The adoption of data, KPIs, and analytics helps security prove its value and justify its budget. In a corporate environment demanding measurable results from every function, this approach helps security survive in the short-term. And it enables it to thrive in the longer-term, as it transforms security from a cost center to a strategic investment with measurable returns.