The Synergy Strategy: Building a Proactive Cybersecurity Culture

There’s an idea that’s hard to accept, but it’s there, stubborn and uncomfortable: you’re not as secure as your best technology, you’re as secure as your most vulnerable supplier or associate. That means you are actually subsidizing those risks and attacks if you don´t have the right strategy.

And I don’t say this to create cheap paranoia. I say it because, if you look at it calmly, your company looks more like a high-performance team — the kind that operates at their limit on the track — than a neat office with cubicles and manuals. You can have budget, top-tier tools, beautiful dashboards … but what really makes the difference isn’t just the “car” you have, it’s how the entire team behaves when things are fast and the pressure is high.

The easy part of the story is pointing at failures: the phishing email someone clicked on, the provider who never activated MFA, the access nobody revoked when a project ended, the integration with a “cheap and fast” platform no one properly reviewed. We all know those horror stories. We know that in cybersecurity, criminals only have to be right once; you and your team only have to fail once for the loss to be huge.

But stopping there is incomplete. Because there’s also the other side: When the strategy is well designed and the culture actually works, you can feel it. A lot. You don’t just reduce the risk of disaster, your operation becomes more agile, your providers respect you more, your team feels part of something serious, and, paradoxically, you can move faster without playing digital Russian roulette.

Think of your organization as that racing team competing in a long championship. Yes, there’s a race where everything can go off a cliff because of a bad decision, but there are also hundreds of moments where the wins stack up: clean pit stops, timely decisions, almost automatic coordination between people who trust each other. That’s exactly what a good cybersecurity strategy is aiming for: turning wins into routine and mistakes into rare events that are detected and corrected before they become disasters.

Day-to-day, those wins look less dramatic than a headline-level breach, but they’re just as real:

• The employee who feels something “off” in an email and reports it instead of clicking.
• The provider who alerts you immediately after detecting an anomaly instead of hiding it.
• The business area that brings IT and security into the conversation from the start, not when everything is already signed.
• The project manager who chooses “let’s do it right” over “let’s do it fast and we’ll fix it later.”

None of that hits the news. But that’s where the real return of a healthy culture lives. When the strategy is solid and the culture isn’t broken, very interesting things start happening:

• Incidents become manageable because they rarely reach “catastrophe” level.
• Mistakes are caught early, contained, fixed. Instead of epic crises every six months, you get small weekly adjustments.
• Security stops being “the people who always say no” and becomes “the people who keep us out of trouble.”
• Business stops seeing IT as a brake and starts seeing them as copilots helping take the curve faster without losing control.
• The message stops being “here’s your access, don’t break anything” and becomes “if you want to work with us, this is the standard; if something happens, we fix it together.”

Serious providers appreciate that, because it helps them get their own house in order too. When there’s already a culture of synergy (and not silos), in a real incident you don’t have every department hiding information or blaming each other. You have people sharing data, proposing solutions, and understanding that the enemy isn’t inside, it’s outside.

And this connects directly with that brutal asymmetry I mentioned: attackers only need you to fail once. The smart way to rebalance the board a bit is to make sure your successes don’t depend on isolated heroes, but on a complete system: people, processes, providers, and technology all rowing in the same direction.

This is where the comparison with high-performance teams makes sense, but in a more subtle way. It’s not about romanticizing speed or “living on the edge,” it’s about understanding the logic: behind every consistent result, there are three things:

• A strategy everyone understands.
• Clear roles that are well coordinated.
• A culture where learning from mistakes is more valuable than hiding them.

Now map that to your company:

If the cybersecurity strategy is a document only three people understand, you’ve already started wrong. It has to be something any business leader can explain in simple language: what we protect, why, who we rely on, and what we expect from each person. That lowers anxiety, improves cooperation, and reduces the odds that someone will “do magic” on their own and open a big hole.

If roles aren’t clear, everyone assumes “someone else will handle it”: the provider assumes you’re monitoring, you assume the provider will alert you, business assumes IT reviewed the contract, IT assumes legal filtered the risks … and the only one who doesn’t assume anything is the attacker, who comes in right where everyone else was “confident.”

On the other hand, when roles are defined and coordination is deliberate, real synergies appear: procurement knows what to ask and what to demand in terms of security from any provider. Legal builds in reasonable clauses for notification, audit, confidentiality, and incident handling. Security and IT define non-negotiable minimums (MFA, encryption, segmentation, among others) without blocking the business. Operations and front-line teams understand their way of working directly impacts risk: how they handle access, data, devices, and others.

All of this sounds formal, but in practice it feels like flow: things move with fewer collisions because everyone shares the same mental map. And that’s the key: synergies, not silos.

Silos are great for building territory, ego, and endless email threads. Synergies are great for preventing problems that no one fully sees from their own trench.

Take third-party risk as an example. If only security looks at it, it can turn into a bureaucratic exercise: questionnaires, checklists, evidence folders nobody revisits. If only procurement looks at it, it may shrink to “just sign this paper and we’re good.” If only legal looks at it, it can turn into massive contracts that push providers to say yes to everything, and then comply with almost nothing.

But when they look at it together, something changes: Procurement understands which requirements are critical and which are “nice to have;” security translates technical risks into business language; legal drafts contracts that reflect operational reality; business teams understand why some “cheap” providers don’t pass the filter.

This will result in fewer surprises, fewer excuses, less “I thought you were handling that.” And a much higher chance that when a third party fails — because it will happen sooner or later — the impact is containable.

Meanwhile, every success keeps stacking up: That project that launches with properly scoped permissions instead of “admin for everyone.” That integration with a key provider that’s been thoughtfully reviewed. That training where someone avoids falling for fraud and shares the story so others learn. That policy that doesn’t just live in SharePoint but actually guides decisions.

All those small victories don’t have the drama of a breach, but they’re exactly what keeps the company on track, lap after lap, season after season.

The harsh reality doesn’t change: Yes, digital criminals only need to be right once. Yes, you only need one serious failure to end up in a huge mess.

But your margin for maneuver lies in everything you do before that: in how you choose providers, in how you train your people, in how you break silos so information flows, in how you accept that cybersecurity is not a department, it’s a way of working.

Technology matters. A lot. Tools and infrastructure are like machines and systems: if they’re bad, there’s not much you can do. But what truly turns a company into a more secure organization is something else: 

• The strategy that aligns everyone.
• The culture that allows people to talk about risk without fear.
• The synergies that ensure that when someone makes a mistake, others spot it and help before it’s too late.

In the end, it’s not about living in fear of the next breach, but about building a way of working where good decisions are more likely than bad ones. Where people understand the impact of their actions, providers know the relationship is serious, and attackers at least have to work much harder than with the average target. Because yes: you are still only as secure as your most vulnerable provider and collaborator. The difference lies in how vulnerable you let them be, and how strong a web of synergies you build around them so that one mistake doesn’t decide your company’s future. Because at the end of the day, synergy is not optional. Synergy is THE strategy.

Always open and happy to receive feedback. Let’s talk.