Cyber Tactics
Don’t Ignore the Most Important System You Manage
Be sure to maintain the most critical piece of infrastructure: the human running it.
I was at an ISACA conference recently and had the chance to hear Shola Richards speak. If you haven’t heard him, his energy is incredible, but what really stuck with me wasn’t just the motivation — it was the way he framed resilience. He challenged us to take the very lessons we use in our cybersecurity strategy — the logic, the frameworks, and the defenses we build for a living — and apply them to our own lives.
In our world, we don’t build systems under the delusion that they’ll never be attacked. We know better. Instead, we build resilient systems: architecture that can take a hit, recover quickly, and come out stronger on the other side.
So why don’t we do that for ourselves? We’re so busy defending the network that we forget to maintain the most critical piece of infrastructure in the enterprise: the human running it. It’s time to move past generic “avoid burnout” advice and start looking at our own playbooks.
The Human CIA Triad
We live by the CIA triad at work, but Shola’s take on applying it to our personal lives was a total “aha” moment for me.
- Confidentiality: This is fundamentally about access control. In cyber, we don’t give admin rights to everyone. In life, we shouldn’t give “emotional admin rights” to every person or notification that demands our attention. Not everyone deserves root access to your time and energy.
- Integrity: Does your public leadership match your private reality? If you’re telling your team to “log off and recharge” while you’re sending emails at 2 a.m., you’re a corrupted system. That disconnect creates a kind of internal friction that drains your battery faster than anything else.
- Availability: We all know 100% uptime is a myth for machines, so why do we expect it from ourselves? True availability isn't about being “on” 24/7; it’s about being fully present when it matters. To do that, you have to schedule planned maintenance windows — meaning you must be deliberately “offline” sometimes to prevent an unscheduled crash.
“In our world, we don’t build systems under the delusion that they’ll never be attacked. We know better. Instead, we build resilient systems: architecture that can take a hit, recover quickly, and come out stronger on the other side.”
Being the Buffalo
Shola shared a story about storms that I haven't been able to stop thinking about. When a storm rolls in, cows run away from it. But because they aren’t very fast, the storm eventually catches them. They end up running with the storm — staying trapped in the rain and wind way longer than they had to.
Buffalo, on the other hand, wait for the storm and then charge directly into it. By running toward the trouble, they get through it faster and come out the other side sooner.
In our industry, the “storm” is usually that awkward conversation with a stakeholder, a critical project that’s going off the rails, or a major mistake we need to own up to. Every day we avoid it, we’re being the cow. Resilience is about being the buffalo — facing the hard stuff head-on so we can get back to clear skies.
Defense-in-Depth (The Power of Empathy)
We know that a single firewall isn't enough. We need layers. In our personal lives, those layers of Defense-in-Depth are built through empathy.
It starts with how we treat our users — not as “security risks,” but as people. It moves to our teams, where we need to start noticing the person before the alert. When someone misses a deadline, the first question shouldn’t be “Where is the report?” It should be “Are you okay?”
But the hardest layer is empathy for ourselves. We’re great at patching servers, but we’re terrible at patching our own lives. We need to trust our own need for rest with the same logic we use to trust a system’s need for a reboot. It’s not a weakness; it’s a maintenance requirement.
A Quick Personal Audit
Just like we perform regular security assessments, I’ve started asking myself three questions at the end of every month:
- What’s my biggest “unpatched vulnerability” — that one tough conversation or decision I’m avoiding? (Time to be the buffalo).
- Which part of my personal CIA triad is failing right now?
- Am I giving myself the same grace I’d give a colleague who was struggling?
The Bottom Line
The reality of our jobs is that the threats aren’t going away. With AI accelerating the threat landscape, the pace isn’t going to slow down. But we already have the tools to handle it — we just have to stop ignoring the most important “system” we manage.
You’re already resilient. You’ve survived every “worst-day-ever” the job has thrown at you so far. The goal now is to be intentional about it: building that resilience before the next incident occurs, not while you’re standing in the middle of a triage.
Start small. Set one boundary this week. Have that one hard conversation. Choose one thing to “patch.” Then next week, do it again.
Resilience isn't built in grand gestures. It's built in the daily, disciplined choices to protect your CIA triad, face your storms and back your team.
The storms are coming.
Will you be the cow, or the buffalo?
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