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For me, being the CISO meant becoming the person who had to say yes, no, or not yet. Some decisions genuinely needed my judgment. Others waited because the authority, information, or escalation path sat with me—or because no one had made it clear who else could act. That experience is mine, not a rule that every CISO must be a bottleneck.
Why the CISO role can feel like a bottleneck
The role increasingly spans decisions that touch business risk, technology, and executive oversight. In a 2026 Splunk/Cisco report, nearly four out of five surveyed 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. The survey also found that nearly all respondents had responsibility for AI governance and risk management, while more than four in five oversaw secure software development (DevSecOps). Splunk/Cisco’s 2026 CISO report describes the scope; it does not show that centralizing decisions is inevitable.
The same report found that more than three quarters of respondents were concerned about personal liability for security incidents. That concern may help explain why some decisions feel difficult to hand off, but survey results cannot establish why any particular CISO holds onto authority.
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Security leadership is connected to decisions beyond the security team
In Splunk/Cisco’s 2025 survey, 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 study’s fieldwork took place in June and July 2024 and included 600 respondents—500 security leaders and 100 board members—in 10 countries. These figures show executive and board access among that survey’s respondents, not a universal reporting structure. The 2025 Splunk/Cisco report on CISO-board relations also found that 29% 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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A separate IANS and Artico Search analysis classified 28% of CISOs in its 2025 State of the CISO analysis as “Strategic,” a publisher-defined benchmark category associated with C-level access and board influence. Its report page says the analysis drew on more than 800 CISOs surveyed from April through November 2024. That classification is one benchmark, not a universal definition of an effective CISO. IANS and Artico Search’s 2025 State of the CISO report
Accountability does not have to mean approving every action
One useful counterpoint to the bottleneck pattern is shared accountability. In the 2026 Splunk/Cisco survey, respondents said joint accountability delivered the most value for key security initiatives (62%), security budget and funding (55%), and access to security-relevant data (49%). These are respondents’ assessments of where shared accountability helps; they do not prescribe a particular company’s approval structure.
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The distinction that matters in practice is between being accountable for oversight and personally approving every operational choice. A CISO can remain responsible for setting expectations, monitoring risk, and escalating material issues while other roles execute decisions within agreed boundaries. Whether that division works depends on the organization’s formal authority, applicable obligations, and the people’s ability to act—not on a survey statistic.
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To identify where I was genuinely required and where I had become the default stop, I would examine decisions by their type, ownership, and consequences. The following is a governance lens, not a claim that every organization should assign authority in exactly this way.
- Strategic risk acceptance: Identify who is formally authorized to accept residual risk. The CISO may advise, document, or escalate without being the person empowered to accept the business consequence.
- Incident command: Clarify who leads operational response, who makes business-impact decisions, and when the CISO must be notified or take a specific role.
- Policy exceptions: Separate the security recommendation from the approval authority. Record the rationale, duration, compensating measures, and escalation route where the organization requires them.
- Routine control implementation: Check whether teams can select and operate approved controls without seeking case-by-case executive approval.
- Business-owned decisions with security input: Make clear who owns the decision, what risk advice security provides, and how unresolved concerns reach an authorized decision-maker.
For each recurring approval, ask who recommends, who approves, who executes, and who owns the residual risk. Also consider impact and reversibility: a high-consequence decision that is hard to undo may warrant escalation, while routine, reversible work may have a different path. This is a way to expose unclear decision rights, not a substitute for legal, regulatory, or company-specific requirements.
What makes delegation workable
Delegation is not simply telling a team to “use judgment.” People need enough context to understand the decision, the authority to act, and a known route for raising exceptions. When any of those are missing, work can still funnel back to the CISO even if the org chart suggests otherwise.
- Define boundaries: State which decisions a role can make independently and which require consultation, approval, or escalation.
- Make risk ownership explicit: Distinguish security advice from the authority to accept business risk.
- Provide context and capability: Confirm that the decision-maker has the relevant information, skills, and access to the people affected.
- Set an escalation route: Specify what triggers escalation, who receives it, and how urgent issues are handled.
- Review what returns to you: Repeated escalations may signal a genuine need for senior judgment—or a missing policy, unclear boundary, or lack of capability. Determine which before changing the approval path.
Team strain is context, not proof of the cause
The 2026 Splunk/Cisco report found that nearly two-thirds of 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 survey-reported results, not prevalence estimates for all security workers, and they do not explain why an individual CISO centralized decisions. They do, however, illustrate the operational pressures surrounding security leadership.
In that report, CISOs commonly used incident reduction, mean time to detect (MTTD), and mean time to respond (MTTR) to explain security return on investment to leadership. Such measures can make operational outcomes more legible; they do not measure whether the CISO has become an approval bottleneck.
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Why the title is personal, not universal
The phrase “I always had to be” describes one person’s experience. The available surveys document a more complex role, executive and board involvement, and reported team pressures. They do not test whether CISO decision centralization is inevitable, or verify this author’s specific experience. To make the claim meaningful, the account needs concrete examples: which decision required the CISO’s personal approval, what made that authority non-delegable, and which choices could have been made elsewhere.
Context also matters. For example, a 2024 Deloitte-NASCIO study focused specifically on state-government CISOs: median tenure was 23 months, down from 30 months two years earlier; nearly half named cybersecurity staffing among their top-five challenges, and 59% reported using third-party contractors to augment internal teams. Those findings describe state CISOs, not the CISO profession as a whole. The 2024 Deloitte-NASCIO state CISO study
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