The NIST Cybersecurity Framework at a Glance

The NIST Cybersecurity Framework breaks security into five core functions: Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond, and Recover 1. In simple terms, it’s a lifecycle: first know what you have and what risks you face (Identify), then guard your systems (Protect), watch for intrusions (Detect), react to incidents (Respond), and restore normalcy (Recover). Ideally, an organization’s security program should balance all these areas 2 3. In practice, however, some of these functions get showered with budget and vendor attention, while others are treated like the unglamorous stepchildren of cybersecurity. Why is that, and what are the consequences?

Chasing Shiny Tools: The Popularity of Detection

Detection technologies have become the star of many security budgets in recent years. From advanced threat monitoring platforms to AI-driven intrusion detection, these tools promise to spot attackers in action. They often come with sleek dashboards and real-time “pew-pew” maps – those world maps with flashing arcs showing cyberattacks flying across the globe. Executives love these flashy visuals; they look straight out of a Hollywood hacker scene and give a satisfying illusion of control 4 5. One tongue-in-cheek nickname for such eye-candy displays is the “Management Pacification Device,” because they impress non-technical stakeholders despite providing little actionable insight 6 7. The allure of these tools isn’t just their graphics, though. They also fit a compelling narrative: “Hackers are already in; we need to catch them fast!” This “assume breach” mindset took hold after companies realized no barrier is foolproof 8 9. Vendors and marketers have capitalized on it, emphasizing early threat detection and rapid response as must-haves. In fact, while enterprises used to pour roughly 75–80% of security spend into preventative measures, many have been shifting more budget into detection solutions over the past decade 10 11. A 2017 industry survey noted a substantial rise in budget share for detection tools as companies moved to improve “in-network threat visibility” and modernize their defenses 12 13.

Why are detection tools so commercially popular? Part of the reason is tangible metrics and ROI display. It’s easy for a vendor to demo a SIEM or XDR product that shows “we caught 5,000 attacks and 200 malware instances last month” – flashy numbers that look like results. These tools generate constant alerts and charts that can justify their own existence. By contrast, if you invest in quietly hardening your systems, the “result” is mostly nothing happens – which is exactly what you want, but it’s harder to show off. There’s a psychological bias at play: people value action and visible feedback. Catching a hacker red-handed feels more heroic than the absence of a breach thanks to good configuration. Marketing psychology amplifies this – fear and urgency sell. Vendors often warn of the threats lurking undetected in your network (creating fear), then offer their detection gadget as the reassuring solution. It’s a classic case of selling the antidote to a feared outcome. Moreover, detection and response services tend to be subscription-based or managed services, which are attractive business models. They offer ongoing revenue and high profit margins for providers, whereas one-off hardening projects or training sessions are less lucrative. In short, detection tools come with both “cool tech” appeal and a strong sales incentive for the industry.

Hardening and Prevention: The Overlooked Heroes

If detection is the flashy hero on stage, prevention (especially basic hardening) is the unsung hero working behind the scenes. Hardening systems – things like applying security patches, configuring devices securely, removing unused services, enforcing strong passwords – doesn’t make headlines. These tasks are often tedious and largely invisible when done right. Perhaps that’s why many organizations neglect them. Yet, over and over, studies show that the majority of cyber incidents could be stopped by these basic measures. One analysis estimated 93% of breaches could have been prevented with simple security hygiene practices like patching and proper configurations 14. Similarly, the CIS Critical Security Controls rank “Inventory and Control of Enterprise Assets” as the #1 control, highlighting that knowing and hardening what you have is foundational to security 15 16. Despite this, companies often focus on perimeter defenses or fancy new tools and leave fundamental hardening by the wayside 17 18. The result? Many breaches stem from unpatched known vulnerabilities or misconfigured systems that attackers easily exploit – essentially doors left unlocked. It’s not exciting to talk about “did we turn off all default passwords?” but failing to do so can be disastrous.

Why is prevention under-emphasized? One reason is a lack of immediate gratification. Successfully preventing an attack is a non-event – there’s nothing to see, so it tends to be taken for granted. It’s akin to maintaining good health: if you never get sick, people rarely applaud your excellent diet and exercise regimen. In corporate environments, tightening security configurations might even be viewed as a nuisance because it can inconvenience users or delay deployments. As one expert wryly noted, there’s often a culture of seeing security hygiene as a “handcuff” or obstacle to the business, rather than an essential enabler19 20. This cultural resistance leads employees to skirt policies (like reusing weak passwords or neglecting updates) in favor of getting work done quickly21 22. Another factor is the diffused responsibility of prevention. Hardening isn’t a single product you can buy; it’s a collection of practices spanning IT and security teams. It requires coordination, constant upkeep, and sometimes downtime to implement patches – efforts that may not show payoff until “something bad doesn’t happen.” In contrast, a detection gadget can be plugged in and promises instant visibility. The path of least resistance (and the shinier object) often wins budget priority.

Other Underappreciated Areas: Identify and Recover

Beyond pure prevention, other NIST functions also struggle for attention. The Identify function – essentially knowing your assets, data, and risks – is frequently underdeveloped. Many organizations don’t maintain a full inventory of their computers, devices, and cloud services. In one survey, only 28% of companies believed their asset inventory was more than 75% complete 23. Think about that: most companies are flying partially blind about what they even have to protect. If you don’t know an old server exists, you surely aren’t patching or monitoring it. Attackers know this, which is why shadow IT and forgotten systems are prime targets. Investing in asset management and risk assessment doesn’t come with shiny toys; it involves spreadsheets, audits, and tough organizational questions – efforts that can be easy to postpone. But skipping Identify means your Protect and Detect measures might miss entire swaths of your IT footprint.

Similarly, the Recover function is often an afterthought until disaster strikes. This covers data backups, disaster recovery plans, and business continuity. Companies do spend money on backup solutions (a classic IT responsibility), but comprehensive recovery planning and testing is less glamorous. Ensuring you can rapidly restore operations after a ransomware attack, for instance, might not get the same budget love as a new threat intel feed. The consequence of under-investing in recovery is painfully clear: organizations hit by attacks can face prolonged downtime or permanent data loss because their recovery playbook was untested or incomplete. In essence, nobody gets credit for recovery plans on a sunny day, but everyone will blame their absence in a storm.

Why This Imbalance? (Psychology and Incentives)

The trend emerges from a mix of human psychology, business incentives, and structural challenges. Psychologically, we’re drawn to solutions that provide a sense of active defense. Detection and response satisfy a visceral need to fight back and see results (“we caught X bad events!”). Prevention feels passive by comparison – when it works, nothing happens, which can perversely make people doubt whether it was needed at all. There’s also the issue of availability bias: high-profile breaches and hacker stories are constantly in the news, making leaders anxious to have tools that will alert them to any similar trouble. That fear can overshadow the quieter risks of not patching or not knowing your assets, which don’t make headlines until it’s too late.

From a marketing and economic standpoint, vendors find it easier to package and sell detection/response tools. These often come as recurring subscriptions, managed services, or appliances that promise turnkey benefits. There’s a clear profit model in continuously analyzing threats or logging data. In contrast, who profits if a company simply enables multi-factor authentication everywhere and closes configuration gaps? Those measures drastically improve security, but they use built-in features or one-time consulting – not exactly a recurring revenue goldmine for a third party. This doesn’t mean vendors are nefariously pushing useless products (detection tech is genuinely important), but it does explain why the marketplace is flooded with “solutions” for Detect/Respond and relatively fewer for fundamentals like hardening. Even when tools for basics exist (asset management platforms, configuration scanners, etc.), they aren’t hyped in the same way. They require organizational willpower to act on their findings rather than providing a neat “service” that can be outsourced.

Lastly, consider organizational inertia. Large enterprises historically poured money into firewalls, antivirus, and other Protect measures (often to satisfy compliance). They ended up with prevention-heavy, fortress-style postures 24. When advanced threats still broke through, the pendulum swung towards detection to fill the gap 25 26. But resources are finite and expertise is scarce. Many teams ended up over-correcting, building up detection capabilities while their patching cadence, configuration management, and asset tracking fell behind. It’s challenging to excel at everything simultaneously, especially with the cybersecurity skills shortage. Often, the talent and time needed for rigorous hardening just aren’t there – it’s easier to buy a service that watches for the inevitable breach than to painstakingly prevent all breaches. As one security veteran quipped, “you cannot hygiene your way to detection… and no amount of prevention will help when prevention fails” 27. In other words, you do eventually need detection, but that shouldn’t be a reason to neglect hygiene.

Striking a Balance: Lessons and Recommendations

The key takeaway is that a balanced approach across the NIST functions is vital. Over-investing in one area while starving another creates a lopsided defense. Imagine a castle with high walls (Protect) and vigilant guards (Detect) but a careless quartermaster who never maps or fixes the weak spots in the walls (Identify/Protect hardening) – or no plan for what to do if the enemy breaks through (Respond/Recover). To avoid such imbalance, organizations should calibrate their investments and attention roughly in line with expert guidelines. For example, one set of industry research suggests allocating roughly 35–40% of security resources to Prevention (Protect), about 25–30% to Detection, and another 25–30% to Response/Recovery 28 29. This ensures you’re not betting everything on one layer of defense. Prevention includes those crucial hardening activities (patch management, configuration, identity management) that dramatically reduce risk 30. Detection capabilities remain indispensable – breaches will happen, and early spotting can save millions (organizations using security AI and automation saved ~$2.2M per incident on average) 31 32. But detection should complement, not replace, good baseline security.

Concretely, what can be done? For all parties – whether you’re a CISO, an IT manager, or a security vendor – the lesson is to put first things first: get your house in order, then add the fancy extras. This means establishing strong foundational practices (asset inventory, vulnerability management, system hardening, user training) and making sure they actually happen continuously. Measure and celebrate improvements in these areas internally – for instance, track the percentage of systems fully patched within SLA, or how often you’re able to thwart phishing via MFA. These aren’t vanity metrics; they directly correlate to risk reduction 33 34. At the same time, implement capable detection and incident response processes as a safety net. Test your response plans with drills; a plan that sits on a shelf is almost as bad as no plan at all. And don’t forget recovery: regularly verify that backups work and that you can restore critical operations quickly in a crisis. It’s boring homework, but when ransomware hits, it’s the difference between an inconvenience and a company-ending event.

From a cultural perspective, organizations should strive to change the narrative around security basics. Upper management must understand that effective cybersecurity isn’t just buying the latest box with blinking lights – it’s also the cumulative effect of many uncelebrated actions. Leadership can support this by asking the right questions. Instead of only asking “How many threats did we detect this month?”, also ask “Have we reduced the number of unpatched critical vulnerabilities?” or “Do we know all our assets and their risk status?”. When the board shows interest in these areas, it filters down as validation for the team working on them. Security teams, for their part, can translate the value of prevention into business terms: for example, highlight that patching that critical server now prevents an X million dollar potential breach down the line – a ROI just as real as any fancy tool catching an intruder.

In summary, each function of the NIST model has a role in a resilient cybersecurity posture. Detection and response technologies may be getting the spotlight – often for good reason – but they are not a substitute for robust identification, protection, and recovery practices. The goal is to avoid tunnel vision. Just as in psychology we know a balanced lifestyle beats any single silver bullet solution, in cybersecurity we must balance the high-tech and the basics. The most effective organizations blend modern detection capabilities with strong preventive hygiene. They invest in “boring” things like hardening legacy systems and training staff, alongside the shiny tools. And interestingly, when they do the boring stuff well, the flashy dashboards suddenly start showing a lot less red – which is the prettiest picture of all.

Sources: The insights and data in this article are supported by industry research and expert analysis, including budget distribution recommendations cloudcomputing.co cloudcomputing.co, historical spending patterns medium.com, and studies on the effectiveness of basic security hygiene graylog.org. Notably, 93% of cybersecurity incidents could be prevented by basic measures graylog.org, yet most companies still struggle with asset visibility runzero.com and timely patching. The trend of increased spending on detection is documented as organizations adopt an “assume breach” mindset helpnetsecurity.com helpnetsecurity.com, even as experts caution not to neglect fundamental protections graylog.org. A balanced approach aligning with frameworks like NIST is widely recommended to ensure no essential function is left behind cloudcomputing.co cloudcomputing.co.