Welcome to this week’s edition of Cyber Motion, tailored for cybersecurity business leaders. In this newsletter, you’ll find practical strategies, cutting-edge insights, and fresh thinking designed to help your security-focused brand break through a crowded market. My goal is to equip you with the tools and ideas needed to thrive amid shifting threats, buyer skepticism, and evolving industry standards.

– Tobias

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While your competitors scramble to respond to threats, the smartest cybersecurity vendors are repositioning their entire go-to-market strategy around a fundamental shift: customers aren't buying protection anymore. They're buying confidence in an uncertain world.

The numbers tell a story that should fundamentally change how you think about your market. According to PwC's latest Global Digital Trust Insights survey of nearly 4,000 executives across 72 countries, 60% of organizations now rank cyber investment as a top-3 priority specifically because of geopolitical uncertainty. Not because of a breach. Not because of compliance pressure. Because the world has become unpredictable, and cybersecurity has become a hedge against that unpredictability.

But here's where it gets interesting: only 6% of those same organizations feel confident across all their vulnerability areas. Think about that gap for a moment. The demand signal is massive, executives know they need to invest, but confidence remains stubbornly low despite increased spending. This isn't a product problem. It's a trust problem. And trust problems are solved through positioning, not through features.

The World Economic Forum's Global Cybersecurity Outlook reinforces this dynamic from a different angle. They found that 72% of organizations report their cyber risks increased over the past year, yet the response has been fragmented and often counterproductive. Two-thirds of organizations are spending roughly equal amounts on reactive measures (incident response, recovery, fines) as they are on proactive measures like continuous monitoring and security assessments. Only 24% have shifted their spending significantly toward proactive investment, which is the only ratio that actually reduces total cost and risk over time.

Your customers know this instinctively. They understand they're trapped in an expensive cycle of reaction and recovery. But they need permission and justification to break that cycle. The question is: are you giving them that permission, or are you inadvertently reinforcing the reactive mindset by leading with incident response capabilities?

There's a deeper transformation happening that smart vendors are already capitalizing on. The PwC data reveals that small and mid-sized organizations are experiencing a confidence crisis that large enterprises have largely avoided. In 2022, only 7% of small organizations reported insufficient cyber resilience. By 2025, that number jumped to 35%, a fivefold increase in just three years. Meanwhile, large organizations have actually improved, with insufficient resilience dropping from 13% to 7%.

This isn't just a market segmentation insight. It's a fundamental divergence that requires completely different go-to-market strategies for different customer profiles. Large enterprises are consolidating around supply chain resilience. 54% cite third-party risk management as their biggest barrier to cyber resilience. They need vendors who can speak to ecosystem complexity and interdependencies. Small and mid-sized organizations, on the other hand, are drowning. They need vendors who acknowledge resource constraints and offer clarity, not complexity.

The AI conversation represents another inflection point that most vendors are handling poorly. The WEF found that 66% of executives expect AI to have the most significant impact on cybersecurity over the next 12 months, yet only 37% have processes in place to assess the security of AI tools before deploying them. There's a massive gap between anticipation and readiness. Even more telling, 47% cite adversarial advances powered by generative AI as their primary concern, and 42% experienced successful social engineering attacks in the past year.

What does this mean for how you position your company? It means the winners in 2025 won't be those who simply add AI features to their roadmap. They'll be the vendors who help customers navigate the AI paradox, where AI is simultaneously the most promising defensive capability and the most concerning offensive threat vector. You're not selling AI-powered security. You're selling a safe path through an AI-uncertain landscape.

Perhaps the most overlooked opportunity in the data is what I'll call the quantum positioning window. PwC found that 49% of organizations haven't even considered or started implementing quantum-resistant security measures, and only 3% have implemented all the leading measures. Quantum computing consistently ranks in the top five threats that organizations feel least prepared to address. This represents a rare moment where education and early positioning can establish category leadership before the market fully matures.

The vendors who capture this opportunity won't be those with the most advanced quantum-resistant technology. They'll be those who make quantum readiness understandable and actionable for executives who are already overwhelmed with complexity.

Which brings us back to the central insight. In a world where 71% of cyber leaders believe small organizations have reached a critical tipping point where they cannot adequately secure themselves, where geopolitical tensions are directly reshaping investment priorities, where AI creates both promise and peril, where the gap between large and small organizations is widening every quarter, success will belong to vendors who position themselves as trusted guides through uncertainty, not as sellers of security products.

Your customers are facing an inflection point. The question is whether you're framing that inflection point as a crisis that requires your product, or as an opportunity that requires a new strategy, one you're uniquely positioned to help them navigate. The companies that choose the latter are the ones that will build durable competitive advantage over the next 24 months.

Stay sharp,
Tobias