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Random freezes, missing sound and display glitches usually trace back to one bad driver. Find and replace yours safely.Free scan · under a minuteAs CISO, I was the bottleneck. I always had to be—not because every security decision truly belonged with me, but because the role kept expanding and the boundaries around it were not always clear. That is my experience, not a rule about every CISO. The useful question is which decisions genuinely need the CISO’s judgment, and which only wait for it because no one else has clear authority to act.
Why the CISO role can feel impossible to contain
The CISO’s remit increasingly touches work that used to sit elsewhere: security strategy, incident response, software development, data, and now AI governance. Splunk and Cisco’s 2026 survey found that nearly four out of five CISOs said their role had become significantly more complex. Oxford Economics surveyed 650 CISOs in July and August 2025 across Australia, France, Germany, India, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Splunk’s 2026 State of Security report also says nearly all respondents had AI governance and risk management responsibilities, while more than four in five oversaw secure software development.
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That breadth makes the CISO a natural point of escalation. It does not mean every choice should be made there. A leader can be accountable for security oversight while peers own business decisions and teams carry out operational work. The distinction is easy to lose when responsibility grows faster than decision rights.
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To understand a bottleneck, start with the decision rather than the title of the person who currently approves it. Some decisions carry consequences that warrant executive-level risk judgment; others are routine implementation choices, or business decisions that need security advice but remain owned by the business.
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| Decision type | Question to ask |
|---|---|
| Strategic risk acceptance | Who has authority to accept the residual risk, and is that authority formally defined? |
| Incident command | Who leads the response, and which conditions require the CISO to step in? |
| Policy exception | Who can approve an exception, for how long, and with what documented rationale? |
| Routine control implementation | Does the responsible team have the context, skill, and authority to choose and execute a suitable control? |
| Business-owned decision with security input | Can the business owner make the choice after receiving a clear account of the security implications? |
For each recurring decision, make four roles explicit: who recommends, who approves, who executes, and who accepts any remaining risk. These roles may belong to different people. If they are unclear, the safest-seeming answer is often “ask the CISO,” and that habit can become the operating model without anyone deliberately choosing it.
Impact and reversibility are useful governance lenses. A high-consequence decision that is difficult to undo may merit senior review; a routine, reversible action may have a different path. That is a way to examine a particular organization, not a universal rule established by survey data.
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Why visibility does not equal control over every decision
CISOs are close to executive and board discussions. In Splunk and Cisco’s 2025 report, 82% of surveyed CISOs said they interacted directly with the CEO, and 83% said they participated in board meetings somewhat often or most of the time. The fieldwork took place in June and July 2024 and included 600 respondents—500 security leaders and 100 board members—in 10 countries. The 2025 report also found that 29% of surveyed CISOs said their board included at least one member with cybersecurity expertise; 60% said board members with cybersecurity backgrounds more heavily influenced security decisions.
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Access creates an opportunity to explain risk and align priorities, but it is not proof that the CISO should approve every operational choice. Splunk CISO Michael Fanning described the opportunity this way: “As cybersecurity becomes increasingly central to driving business success, CISOs and their boards have more opportunities to close gaps, gain greater alignment, and better understand each other in order to drive digital resilience.” That is a vendor executive’s view, not an independent standard for how every board should work.
A separate IANS and Artico Search benchmark classified 28% of CISOs in its 2025 State of the CISO analysis as “Strategic,” a publisher-defined category associated with C-level access and board influence. Its report page says it drew on more than 800 CISO responses collected from April through November 2024. The classification describes that benchmark; it is not a universal taxonomy for CISO roles. IANS and Artico Search’s report page
Shared accountability is a counterweight to the bottleneck
The 2026 Splunk and Cisco survey points to shared accountability as valuable in several areas: key security initiatives (62%), security budget and funding (55%), and access to security-relevant data (49%). Those are respondents’ assessments of where joint accountability delivers value—not proof that every organization has clear ownership or that sharing responsibility automatically fixes delays.
Still, the figures challenge the idea that security leadership must be a solo approval function. Budgets involve business priorities; useful data is distributed across the organization; initiatives require people outside the security team. The CISO can set expectations, make risk visible, and ensure escalation paths exist without becoming the person who personally unblocks every task.
Team strain can add pressure, but it does not explain a leader’s habits
The 2026 report says nearly two-thirds of surveyed security teams experienced moderate to significant burnout. Respondents identified high alert volumes (98%), false alerts (94%), and tool fatigue (79%) as leading stressors. These are report-reported survey results, not prevalence estimates for all security workers, and they do not establish why any individual CISO centralizes decisions.
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Operational overload can make delegation harder: a team may lack time, context, authority, or a reliable escalation route. But the statistics cannot tell whether those conditions caused a particular leader to become a bottleneck. To understand that, look at the actual decision path and ask what made waiting seem necessary.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.How to diagnose a decision bottleneck
- Choose a recurring decision. Use a specific example, such as a policy exception, an incident escalation, or a routine control choice. Avoid diagnosing the whole organization from a vague sense of being busy.
- Reconstruct the path. Identify who raised the issue, who had the relevant information, who recommended an action, who approved it, who executed it, and who accepted any remaining risk.
- Find the reason for escalation. Was the decision formally reserved for the CISO, unusually consequential, difficult to reverse, or simply routed upward by custom? Do not treat these explanations as interchangeable.
- Check what the team needed to act. Ask whether the people closest to the work had enough context, capability, authority, and a known route for escalating exceptions.
- Clarify the boundary. Where formal ownership allows, define which choices a role can make independently, which require consultation, and which need approval. Make the risk-acceptance owner explicit rather than assuming it is the same person who implements the control.
- Review an actual outcome. See whether the clarified path helped the decision move to the right owner. A change in who approves is not automatically an improvement if it leaves risk unowned or obscures accountability.
Formal duties vary by employer, sector, and applicable rules. A recurring approval may be a genuine legal or organizational obligation—or just an inherited practice. Establish which it is before changing the process.
Make security outcomes legible without confusing them with approval speed
The 2026 Splunk and Cisco release says CISOs commonly use incident reduction, mean time to detect (MTTD), and mean time to respond (MTTR) to explain security return on investment to leadership. Those measures can help describe operational outcomes, but they do not by themselves show whether a CISO is a bottleneck. A fast approval process is not necessarily a good one if it sends decisions to the wrong owner; a delay also needs context before it can be attributed to centralized authority.
In state government, the 2024 Deloitte-NASCIO study found a median state CISO tenure of 23 months, down from 30 months two years earlier. Nearly half of state CISOs named cybersecurity staffing as a top-five challenge, and 59% reported using third-party contractors to augment internal teams. Those findings apply to state government, not to CISO roles generally. Deloitte-NASCIO’s 2024 state CISO survey
The honest answer to “I always had to be”
For me, being the bottleneck was a description of how the work ran, not proof that every decision belonged with me. The role’s expanding scope helps explain why so much could land on the CISO’s desk; it cannot establish why one person’s approval became necessary in every case. That takes a closer look at formal authority, organizational habits, and whether others had the information and permission to act.
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