Cybersecurity is no longer a subject reserved for large companies. However, this reality is still not fully integrated.
Cybersecurity is no longer a subject reserved for large companies. It has become a condition for business continuity, confidence and competitiveness. However, in a large part of the economic fabric, this reality is still not fully integrated.
SMEs, ETIs, intermediate structures are moving forward with limited resources, without a dedicated CISO, sometimes without real cyber governance. However, they are exposed to the same threats and the same regulatory requirements as the largest groups. It is in this gap between the level of risk and the level of protection that the cyber poverty threshold emerges, that is to say the point from which a company no longer has the minimum means to defend itself effectively.
Of the 359 million companies worldwide, fewer than 35,000 employ a CISO. In other words, only one company in 10,000 has a dedicated security manager. Yet most compliance frameworks and requirements assume that such a manager is in place. In reality, the vast majority of companies do not have the strategic skills necessary to define and manage an effective security program.
The technological millefeuille trap
Cybersecurity has long been built by accumulation, with each threat, its tool. Firewalls, EDR, SIEM, MDR, MFA or governance solutions have enriched the ecosystem, but also increased its complexity. However, stacking technologies does not guarantee an effective defense. This logic has created environments that are expensive, difficult to manage and generate an overload which itself becomes a risk.
The issue is therefore no longer the number of tools, but their coherence and their ability to offer a unified vision of risk. The cyber poverty line does not reflect a lack of equipment, but a deficit of strategic capacity. Most organizations already have the essential building blocks, what they lack is the ability to make them function as a coherent system, to manage them, optimize them and measure their effectiveness over time.
This responsibility traditionally rests on the CISO, a profile that is nevertheless rare and difficult to recruit. Because cybersecurity is no longer just a technical subject. It now falls under governance and concerns business continuity, risk management, compliance and company reputation. The CISO transforms technical signals into operational decisions, but this function often remains absent, isolated or undersized.
The cyber poverty threshold does not only concern SMEs. International groups may also find themselves below this line when their security capacity has not kept pace with the growth, acquisitions or complexity of their organization. Conversely, smaller companies can exceed it thanks to disciplined governance. This line does not depend on the size of the company, but on its strategic capacity to sustainably manage its cybersecurity.
Towards an increased RSSI
Faced with this reality, we must change scale. The challenge is not to make each SME a security center, but to make cybersecurity accessible to organizations that do not have a high level of internal maturity. This requires industrializing essential governance functions such as data collection and analysis, posture control, compliance, business continuity and risk prioritization; thanks to an augmented, or virtual, CISO based on automation, orchestration and data intelligence.
This development responds to a simple constraint: cybersecurity skills are rare and cannot be internalized everywhere. The response must therefore be as much technological as organizational. Defense must operate as an integrated system, where endpoint, network, cloud, identity, SIEM, MDR and threat intelligence share the same context. If the company does not have a CISO, the system must be capable of providing CISO-level decisions through agentic AI overseen by experts. The intelligence acquired across hundreds of thousands of organizations thus benefits each client.
Artificial intelligence is accelerating this transformation. Faced with telemetry becoming massive, it is essential to analyze, correlate and prioritize data. Automation is no longer a comfort, but a condition of sustainability. AI, however, is a paradox. It democratizes access to advanced detection and response capabilities, while widening the gap between organizations capable of exploiting these systems and those that lag behind, even as attackers also adopt these technologies. It does not replace cyber governance, it makes it more essential than ever, by involving the entire company, from the business lines to general management.
The cyber poverty line is not an abstract formula. It designates a very real fragility, that of companies which no longer have the minimum means to ensure their defense, even though they constitute an essential link in the economy. Leaving them permanently underprotected weakens collective resilience. This situation is not inevitable. It results from a market that has long favored the most mature organizations. Agentic AI today offers the opportunity to democratize access to high-level governance and cybersecurity capabilities. Cybersecurity should no longer be a privilege, it must become a standard of resilience.
