Most CEOs can recite their quarterly benchmarks and revenue down to the decimal point, but ask them about their organization's cyber risk exposure, and the answers become more vague. It's not that today’s CEOs don’t care about security — cybersecurity ranks among the top concerns for boards and executive teams. The problem runs deeper: a fundamental breakdown in how security risks are explained to business leaders that overlooks the impacts on their business outcomes.

Lack of competence is not the cause of most communication issues between CISOs and CEOs. They stem from a familiar problem: the curse of knowledge. The curse of knowledge is a common challenge where experts — in this case security leaders — might assume that everyone in the room has a baseline understanding of technical information and terminology, so they fail to break down complex risks into plain language and elaborate on real-world context.

Ivanti’s 2026 State of Cybersecurity Report underscores this disconnect. Nearly six in 10 security professionals say their teams are only moderately effective at communicating risk exposure to executive leadership.

When CEOs and CISOs don’t speak the same language, critical business vulnerabilities can be obscured by technical jargon. When communication breaks down, organizations waste time and money on misdirected investments while gaps in protection go unnoticed until a breach forces the conversation.

With threat levels rising, AI-enabled attacks are becoming more sophisticated, and data breaches make headlines weekly. The stakes for clear communication between CISOs and executive leadership have never been higher.

To understand why this communication gap persists, we need to examine both the fundamental challenges and the metrics being used to measure success.

Why cyber risk communication fails: the curse of knowledge

That disconnect between CEOs and CISOs isn’t caused by a lack of data. If anything, it’s the opposite. From the CEO's seat, the challenge isn’t attention or intent. Rather, it’s seeing dashboards, metrics, acronyms and severity scores without understanding the impact of these results on the whole business.

Security leaders need to assume that many in the room don’t understand the implications of terms like CVSS scores, attack surfaces and zero-day vulnerabilities. CEOs want more than dashboards filled with metrics, acronyms and severity scores.

Cybersecurity briefings need to go a step further and demonstrate the financial, legal, and reputational implications of these results for the business. A CISO might report "587 critical vulnerabilities detected this month" when what the CEO actually needs to know is: "Which of these threaten our ability to serve customers and what's our plan to address them?"

Cybersecurity KPIs that matter to CEOs

Useful KPIs clearly connect vulnerability management efforts to business risk. However, our cybersecurity research finds that the most used KPIs used by security teams fail to reflect risk context.

Currently, only half of companies (51%) track cybersecurity exposure scores or other risk-based indexes. Many security teams still rely on process metrics such as mean time to remediate (47%) or percentage of exposures remediated (41%).

Metrics like MTTR, patch velocity and percentage remediated matter to security teams, but they measure operational efficiency, not business exposure or potential financial impact. In isolation, they can look reassuring while obscuring the real question: are we managing our risk effectively?

These metrics, which focus on speed and coverage, may look positive on their own, but don’t do much to show whether current remediation efforts actually improve risk posture. It matters less how quickly vulnerabilities are remediated and how many are addressed. What matters more is whether the right problems are being addressed.

Shared understanding between security teams and the board and C-Suite requires grounding inscrutable metrics in real-life stakes. For CEOs, this means aligning with your CISO on the most important risks to your specific organization — are you a financial institution that frequently faces sophisticated fraud schemes, strict compliance requirements like PCI-DSS and SOX and the constant threat of ransomware targeting customer financial data? Are you a healthcare organization grappling with securing an expanding network of connected medical devices while maintaining rigorous compliance standards to protect sensitive patient data?

Let’s illustrate the difference between an executive security briefing that relies only on technical metrics vs. one that adds context and business impact.

What the CISO says:

  • "We discovered 11,000 vulnerabilities.”
  • "MTTR is down to 15 days from 25 days."
  • "We achieved an 88% remediation rate on critical CVEs."

What the CEO actually needs to know:

  • "We’ve identified ten critical vulnerabilities that could impact revenue-generating systems."
  • "If attacked today, we can restore critical operations in six hours compared to 48 hours last year."
  • "This protection enables us to pursue EU expansion without additional compliance risk."

Building an executive-level risk appetite framework

Executive communication depends on shared frameworks and a common point of reference for how risk is defined, measured and discussed. To eliminate inconsistencies and confusion, all stakeholders should be involved in creating and enforcing a risk appetite framework.

A major goal of these conversations is helping business leaders understand that the goal of the cybersecurity program isn't to be completely “risk free” — it’s impossible for any modern organization to become completely risk free. In other words, CEOs must be able to distinguish between their risk appetite and risk posture.

1. Risk appetite: how much risk their business is currently willing to tolerate in pursuit of its overarching goals.

2. Risk posture: the reality of the organization’s current risk exposure.

Most organizations now recognize the need to formalize how much cyber risk they’re willing to accept. Ivanti’s research shows more than 80% of organizations have a documented risk appetite framework.

However, fewer than half of the organizations say these frameworks are closely followed in day-to-day operations. When frameworks exist on paper but don't guide actual decisions, it is highly likely that your organization’s risk appetite and risk posture are not aligned.

How exposure management bridges the communication gap

Exposure management is a risk-based approach that continuously identifies, prioritizes and validates the scope of potential threats across the entire attack surface. Practicing exposure management helps unite security and executive leaders around a single, comprehensive strategy that reorients cybersecurity around business-critical risk.

Instead of treating all vulnerabilities as equal, exposure management focuses on identifying and prioritizing the organization's highest risks by asking:

  • Which current exposures are threat actors exploiting in the wild?
  • Which assets need to be prioritized based on current business operations?
  • Which assets, if compromised, would have the greatest impact in terms of reputational, customer, or legal damages?

Ivanti’s research report shows that nearly two-thirds of organizations now invest in exposure management, and leadership understanding has increased year over-year. But execution still lags: Only about a quarter of organizations rate their ability to assess risk exposure as excellent.

To close that gap and operationalize exposure management effectively, CISOs should anchor executive communication around three principles

1. Translate technical signals into business context. Instead of reporting vulnerability counts, explain which exposures affect revenue-generating systems, customer data or regulated environments.

2. Prioritize emerging threats by impact, not volume. Executives don’t need to track every new attack technique. They need to understand which situations could materially disrupt the business and how prepared the organization is to respond.

3. Use scenarios, not spreadsheets. Narratives that connect cause, impact and outcome, backed by data, help leaders internalize risk and make faster decisions.

This approach shifts your risk mitigation strategy from reactive defense to proactive decision-making.

The path forward

When executives and security leaders speak the same language, the curse of knowledge can be broken and cybersecurity becomes a strategic enabler that protects business value, enables growth and turns security strength into competitive advantage.

The curse of knowledge can be broken — one translated metric, one business-focused conversation, and one clear decision at a time.