Is Compliance Your Cyber Ceiling? It's Time to Build Maturity.
Companies across the country (and world) still start meetings with one question: “Are we compliant?” Adhering to regulatory requirements is important, but does it trump achieving cyber maturity? On the contrary, it is dangerous to focus only on compliance – since it leads to a blind spot.
Back in IBM’s 2021 Cyber Resilient Organization Study, 58% of organizations were at a middle of late-middle maturity for cyber resilience, and 51% had already experienced a significant data breach. In fact, in 2024 alone, the global average cost of data breaches reached USD 4.88 million, a massive 10% increase from 2023 and the highest total ever recorded . Running basic compliance checks are not preventing breaches – they simply end up documenting the vulnerabilities after a breach occurs.
Security services are expected to see the highest growth among all security segments, with a projected 19% increase in 2025. This clearly highlights the fact that organizations are shifting their focus to a resilient approach to cybersecurity overall. Where compliance asks “What should we do?”, cyber maturity asks “How can we be more resilient?”
Understanding What Cyber Maturity Is
If your organization can predict, prevent, detect, respond to, and recover from cyber threats without disrupting your business, you have already understood what cyber maturity is. Compliance is all about meeting the bare minimum of regulatory standards, while cyber maturity focuses on:
- Visibility: Total knowledge of all digital assets, threats and security across all environments
- Agility: Skill to change security measures as the threats evolve or the business grows
- Resilience: Ability to stay functional with low business impact during cyber-attacks or incidents
In McKinsey’s 2021 organizational cyber maturity survey, it was revealed that only a few organizations in banking and healthcare had made progress. Others had significant work ahead. The maturity model they highlight progresses through four levels. Understanding the difference shows you whether you’re focusing on reactive compliance or true cyber maturity which begins at level 3.
Cyber Maturity Levels Comparison
Use this maturity model to benchmark where your organization stands—and what it will take to move up the curve.
Maturity Level | Primary Focus | Key Characteristics | Typical Security Activities | Business Impact |
Level 1: Plugging Gaps | Reactive Response | Ad-hoc, crisis-driven | Basic firewall, antivirus installation | High vulnerability, regular incidents |
Level 2: Structured Approach | Process Implementation | Documented procedures, regular updates | Scheduled patching, basic monitoring | Reduced incidents, improved compliance |
Level 3: Risk-Based | Strategic Threat Management | Proactive assessment, business alignment | Threat intelligence, risk modelling | Enhanced resilience, cost optimization |
Level 4: Proactive Excellence | Predictive defence | AI-driven, adaptive security | Automated threat hunting, predictive analytics | Competitive advantage, business enablement |
The Foundation of Cyber Maturity
Managed SOC for Continuous Readiness
Old fashioned security operations are, in essence, more like an emergency response team – focused on unexpected life-saving than on preventive measures. It means your team doesn’t have a mature Managed Security Operations Centre (SOC). Having a Managed SOC in place means you can shift your security approach to focus on proactive threat hunting and continuous monitoring.
A Managed SOC gives you advanced threat intelligence, behavioural analysis, and automated response protocols that create a security ecosystem that grows and adapts. Integration with leading OEMs like the following ensures that your SOC evolves with growing threats:
- Google SecOps – cloud-native security orchestration
- Splunk – comprehensive data analytics
- Zabbix – infrastructure monitoring
- Symphony Summit – unified security management
Having a more advanced SOC means you don’t just find threats as they attack, but you predict and prevent them. You also gain user behaviour understanding and pattern analysis that spot system anomalies, therefore ensuring 100% safety at all times.
Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing (VAPT)
Just like spring cleaning, most compliance-first organizations treat VAPT as just a yearly task. On the other hand, cyber-mature enterprises embed continuous vulnerability management into their operational DNA itself.
This palpable difference lies in how annual testing only shows a small glimpse while continuous assessment shows live security posture. VAPT programs today integrate easily into business operations with platforms like:
- Tenable (Nessus, IO, SC) – comprehensive vulnerability scanning
- Qualys – cloud-based security assessment
True maturity comes from changing your VAPT from testing to threat modelling. Don’t just identify your vulnerabilities, simulate real-world attack scenarios, assess your business impacts, and focus on remediation of actual risks to business operations.
Cloud and Network Security
As Indian enterprises accelerate digital transformation, securing hybrid environments becomes a cornerstone of cyber maturity. IBM reports that at 34%, APAC was the most-targeted region for cyber-attacks in 2024. Such targeting points out how the region has adopted cloud services without proper comprehensive security maturity.
You can stay ahead by integrating multiple security layers through our specialized OEMs:
- Check Point – next-generation firewalls and threat prevention
- Netskope – cloud access security broker (CASB) capabilities
- Forcepoint – data loss prevention
- Microsoft Cloud Security – native Azure protection
This integration ensures that your security scales strategically with business growth. When you implement zero-trust architecture, you secure every transaction rather than just the perimeters.
Identity and Access Governance
Identity management represents the final frontier of cyber maturity. While basic compliance focuses on password policies and access reviews, mature identity governance treats every user, device, and service as a potential attack vector requiring continuous verification.
Choosing advanced identity governance integrates:
- CyberArk – privileged access management
- RSA – multi-factor authentication
- Yubico – hardware-based security keys
- Entrust – comprehensive identity services
These integrations ensure that your identity fabric adapts to your user behaviour and risk levels. You get zero-standing privileges and continuous verification, which in turn recognizes that assuming trust creates unacceptable risk.
Starting with The SEBI Framework
It is a known fact that SEBI’s Cybersecurity and Cyber Resilience Framework (CSCRF) mandates certain basic controls for cyber risk management and governance. But if you’re simply treating these frameworks as endpoints rather than starting points, you’re creating false security. Compliance only addresses known threats, not the possibilities of evolving and unknown threats.
In 2024, IBM’s X-Force Threat Intelligence Index showed a 71% spike in cyber-attacks that exploited user identities. Out of the attacks, a whopping 85% of the attacks on critical sectors could have been prevented with basic security measures like patches and MFA. This study shows how compliance alone is insufficient.
According to Gartner, India’s security spending was heading to $2.9 billion in 2024, which was a 12.4% increase from 2023. Therefore, cloud security spending shows the highest growth due to hybrid environment challenges and regulatory pressure.
Cyber Maturity and Long-Term Business Resilience
Cyber maturity goes beyond just risk mitigation, with mature organizations consistently outperforming peers across business metrics:
- Reduced Dwell Time: Mature operations detect and respond to threats in minutes thereby reducing incident response times and reputation impact.
- Lower Cost Per Breach: Strategic security postures have lower per-incident costs, creating better competitive advantages over time.
- Enhanced Business Trust: Your customers and stakeholders focus on security maturity rather than just your compliance status.
- Operational Efficiency: Integrate your security operations with your business process through automated threat response and intelligent access controls for enhanced protection.
National Resilience and Enterprise Sustainability
To position India as a true global tech giant, businesses need to achieve cybersecurity maturity that really matches the digital ambitions. Yes, compliance frameworks offer the required basics, but real security comes to organizations that follow cyber maturity as a way to differentiate their business rather than just a regulatory requirement.
The numbers clearly show that organisations who invest heavily in cyber maturity outperform their contemporaries across security effectiveness, business resilience, and competitive positioning. Overall, the country’s security spends continue to grow, therefor the question has changed from ‘should one invest’ to ‘how can one invest more strategically.’
Choose integrated Managed SOC, continuous VAPT, and comprehensive OEM partnerships that foster sustainable competitive advantages. By doing so, you will be protecting yourself and contributing to India’s national cyber resilience.
Is your organization still ticking boxes—or setting the standard for India’s cyber future?
