If you’ve ever found yourself in a room full of business leaders, trying to explain why Log4j matters, you can probably identify with this…
There’s a scene in the movie Lost in Translation, where the American character Bob is shooting a commercial, and the director gives him lengthy instructions in Japanese, which are then translated to him in just a few words. It’s a key scene in a film that explores how meaning is conveyed across cultural and linguistic boundaries, how it can shape — and sometimes completely distort — what is understood and communicated.
If you’ve ever found yourself in a room full of business leaders, trying to explain why Log4j matters, you can probably identify with this. Truth be told, so can your business colleagues. Strip out the technical details to oversimplify, and you lose the nuance and potentially risk poor decision-making. Keep the details to yourself, and your reports could be more like a cure for insomnia than wake-up call.
So how do you shift from payloads to PowerPoints without dumbing down the technical details?
To Make an Impact, Change the Narrative
Traditionally, cybersecurity has been viewed (and framed) as a defensive, reactive exercise. Most executives understand the need for security in an abstract sense, but when it comes to justifying budgets or proving the value of investments, AppSec leaders need to be able to communicate in ways that align with overall business goals. And that calls for a shift in how you tell the story: “70 critical CVEs” is just noise to most CFOs. “This vulnerability could expose our customer database, and carry a GDPR fine of $20m.” That’s signal.
And like all good stories, you need a framework to build on, one that resonates with your audience. Think about it: CISO, CIO, CFO…each role brings its individual lens: risk management, innovation enablement, financial impact. The magic happens when your reporting speaks to all three simultaneously.
For AppSec professionals, that’s where risk-based security and evidence-based reporting come in. They provide a clear structure that helps convey both the technical needs of the business and the business value of security — persuasively and effectively.
Risk-based Security Drives Business Alignment
When cyber risk is viewed through a business lens rather than just a technical one, it becomes a powerful tool for alignment. The trap many security teams fall into is treating data as an outcome in and of itself; they gather every piece of vulnerability data their tools produce without tying it to outcomes.
Think about this scenario: As a security professional, walk into a boardroom and announce, “We have to address 1700 vulnerabilities” before diving into a list of CVEs and CWES, and watch eyes glaze over. Frame it differently, “If these three critical vulnerabilities in our customer portal were breached, it would impact 60,000 customers, with potential costs of $4.88m” — and now you’ve got their attention. Not least because that $4.88m you mentioned wasn’t a thumbsuck; it’s the global average cost of a data breach in 2024, a 10% increase over the previous year.
The really helpful aspect of risk-based language is that it isn’t about creating fear; it’s about providing clarity. Executives have heard the fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) before; when you quantify the risks in business terms, you’re not just describing problems, you’re enabling decisions.
Classic win-win: Executives get the business context they need, security teams make the case for a more proactive approach to risk reduction. By focusing on what matters most to the organization, security leaders can prioritize actions that protect core operations, support strategic business initiatives and enable growth. Risk-based security isn’t just a response to volatility; it’s a foundation for resilience.
AppSec as Business Strategy
With all of the above in mind, here are some practical steps you can take to make AppSec data a strategic business asset — in language your executive (and non-technical) colleagues can understand.
Show them the money: For every security control, there is an equal and opposite financial story. That new ASPM platform isn’t just supporting AppSec best practices, it’s saving money by consolidating tools, bringing clarity, and supporting accelerated software development. Your vulnerability management program isn’t *just* patching — it’s supporting the SOC2 compliance that protects $25m in enterprise contracts at your organization.
Reframe your metrics: Measure what they measure.
- Replace technical indicators with business outcomes.
- Instead of “mean time to detection,” use “potential business impact prevented.”
- Rather than “vulnerability count,” say “risk exposure reduced.”
- To align with the CEO-CIO-CFO trifecta: “Security investments contributed 99.9% uptime this quarter, supporting our SLA commitments and a compliance posture that enabled new revenue opportunities in the healthcare sector.”
Benchmark for the business: Industry-standard comparisons, such as MTTR or MTTD are great for your team, but when you’re in the boardroom, skip it in favour of: “Our incident response time of 4 hours is significantly ahead of our sector’s average of 46 days for breach detection and remediation.”
Connect your wins to theirs: That successful security integration with your CI/CD pipeline didn’t just make your new application more secure, it protected your customer acquisition pipeline too, by ensuring timely delivery of more secure software.
Drop the invisibility cloak: The best security is invisible when it’s working — but how do you report that? Create a “near miss” narrative that highlights your best defense, such as “This month’s secure code review flagged a vulnerability introduced during a feature update. This could have allowed attackers to execute code in our production environment. But thanks to our early detection and remediation, that potential supply chain compromise was stopped before it reached the testing phase.”
Don’t Leave ‘em Hanging
The transformation from technical expert to business partner isn’t just about changing how you communicate — it’s about changing how you think about cybersecurity’s role in the organization. When security becomes an enabler rather than a gatekeeper, when risk management becomes a competitive advantage rather than a cost center, that’s when you’ll have bridged the translation gap. You’re not just reporting on security anymore, you’re providing strategic intelligence.
Back to the movie — in the end, we never find out what it is that Bill Murray whispers to Scarlett Johansson. But like Bob in his Tokyo hotel room, sometimes the most important message isn’t precisely what gets said, it’s what gets understood.
OX Security: Actionable Insights that Speak Executive Language
OX Security’s Unified AppSec platform provides executive-level reports that help AppSec leaders translate complex security data into actionable business insights. Our reports bridge the gap between technical detail and strategic decision-making, empowering executives to champion application security initiatives and show how robust AppSec programs support overall business growth.
OX Security’s executive reports communicate security risks, drive strategic decision-making, and demonstrate security commitment — in clean, clear language that resonates with senior leaders and non-technical decision-makers. See for yourself, take a product tour today.
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