Certified: The GIAC GSTRT Audio Course

In this episode, we bring structure to improvement planning by using two complementary review methods: a straightforward gap review and a Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities Threats (S W O T) review. These are easy to misuse, especially when teams treat them as brainstorming sessions or presentation exercises. When you use them well, they create precision, because they force you to compare what you need against what you have, and then translate that comparison into practical actions. The gap review keeps you honest about capability shortfalls tied to mission outcomes, while the S W O T review keeps you honest about context, timing, and external pressures that can amplify or reduce risk. The end product should not be a wall of sticky notes. It should be a short list of high-impact improvements that can be owned, measured, and closed.

Before we continue, a quick note: this audio course is a companion to our course companion books. The first book is about the exam and provides detailed information on how to pass it best. The second book is a Kindle-only eBook that contains 1,000 flashcards that can be used on your mobile device or Kindle. Check them both out at Cyber Author dot me, in the Bare Metal Study Guides Series.

Start by defining objectives and evaluation criteria upfront, because without that foundation the reviews become subjective and political. Objectives should be tied to mission-critical outcomes, such as reducing exposure to credential theft, improving recovery reliability, tightening compliance posture, or improving detection and response speed. Evaluation criteria should be simple enough to apply consistently and specific enough to prevent vague scoring. Criteria can include effectiveness, coverage, sustainability, auditability, and business impact, but the key is that everyone understands what those words mean in your environment. If one group thinks effectiveness means blocking attacks and another thinks it means generating alerts, you will argue about vocabulary instead of improving controls. You also want to define the time horizon, because an objective that matters this quarter will produce different priorities than an objective focused on the next eighteen months. When objectives and criteria are explicit, the review becomes a tool for alignment rather than a venue for opinion.

Evidence collection is what turns these reviews into engineering rather than storytelling, so gather inputs that reflect how the organization actually performs. Metrics are useful when they are tied to outcomes, such as time to detect, time to contain, patch latency, privileged access review completion, or recovery test success rates. Incidents provide reality, because they show where controls failed, where coordination broke down, and where detection was delayed or misrouted. Interviews are valuable when you use them to understand workflow and friction, not when you treat them as votes on what should happen. Audits and control assessments add another angle by highlighting what is missing from a compliance standpoint and what evidence is weak or inconsistent. As you collect evidence, track where each claim comes from so you can defend conclusions later without relying on memory. Strong evidence also reduces defensiveness, because teams can discuss facts and patterns instead of personal blame.

With evidence in hand, summarize strengths that enable mission-critical performance, because strengths are not just nice to recognize, they are assets you can leverage. A strength might be a highly reliable backup and restore program, a well-tuned identity foundation, strong network segmentation discipline, or a mature on-call and escalation process that keeps incidents contained. Strengths can also be organizational, such as clear ownership, strong partnership between security and engineering, or consistent executive support for risk-based decisions. The point is to describe strengths in terms of outcomes achieved and why they are dependable, not just that they exist. This helps you avoid undermining what is already working when you introduce new initiatives. It also helps you identify patterns worth replicating, such as a process that is measured and improved in one area that could be extended to another. When you name strengths precisely, you can build improvement plans that stand on solid ground.

Next, list weaknesses that undermine reliability or compliance, and be specific about how they show up in day-to-day reality. A weakness is not simply that a tool is missing. It is a repeated condition that leads to failures, drift, unplanned exceptions, or weak evidence during reviews. Weaknesses might include inconsistent asset inventory, incomplete telemetry coverage, alert fatigue that causes missed escalations, slow patching for internet-facing systems, or unclear ownership for high-risk platforms. Compliance weaknesses often show up as missing documentation, inconsistent approvals, or controls that are implemented but not provably maintained over time. The best weakness statements include the impact on mission outcomes and the reason it matters, because that moves the conversation from embarrassment to improvement. It is also important to separate a weakness from a temporary outage or a one-off mistake, because you want systemic issues that deserve investment. Clear weakness statements are uncomfortable, but they are necessary for precise targeting.

Opportunities come next, and they should be grounded in realistic leverage points rather than aspirational wish lists. Technology opportunities might include consolidating overlapping tooling, enabling automation in routine evidence collection, improving detection fidelity through better tuning, or adopting a service that fills a capability gap without creating new complexity. Partnership opportunities might include better alignment with a managed provider, better contractual requirements for third parties, or using internal platform teams to standardize secure patterns. Timing opportunities matter because organizations have natural windows where change is easier, such as during major platform refreshes, cloud migrations, or organization-wide operating model shifts. Opportunities should be written with a clear condition, such as if we do this now, we reduce future cost or risk, because that helps leaders understand why the window matters. It is also reasonable to note opportunities created by past work, such as telemetry foundations that make advanced detection more viable. Good opportunities are not fantasies; they are timely moves that compound value.

Threats in the S W O T sense are external and contextual forces that can drive risk up or constrain your ability to respond, and they need to be articulated without sensationalism. Market threats can include rapid business expansion, acquisition activity, or vendor churn that increases integration complexity and expands attack surface. Regulatory threats include new obligations, changing enforcement focus, or regional requirements that increase evidence expectations and reporting risk. Adversary threats include shifts in attacker behavior, such as increased credential theft, ransomware targeting, or supply chain exploitation, especially when those trends align with your known weaknesses. Dependency threats are often underestimated, such as reliance on a single identity provider, a single cloud region, a single key vendor, or a small number of specialized staff. A threat statement is strongest when it ties the external pressure to a specific capability gap, because that creates urgency that is rational rather than emotional. The goal is to show what could change the risk picture and why it matters to mission outcomes.

After the S W O T framing is clear, return to the gap review discipline and distill gaps into root causes rather than symptoms. Symptoms are what you see, like recurring access exceptions, slow incident containment, or inconsistent audit evidence. Root causes explain why the symptoms recur, such as unclear ownership, lack of standardization, insufficient training, missing telemetry, fragile integrations, or unrealistic process requirements that teams bypass under pressure. Root causes often sit at the intersection of people, process, and technology, which is why narrow fixes sometimes fail. For example, adding a new detection rule does not fix a response bottleneck if the real problem is that the on-call rotation is understaffed or escalation paths are unclear. Similarly, writing a clearer policy does not fix drift if teams lack tooling support to comply without extra effort. Distilling root causes requires honesty and a willingness to challenge assumptions, but it produces fixes that actually hold. When you can articulate the root cause in one or two sentences, you have the foundation for precise action.

Once you understand the gaps, prioritize fixes using value, risk, and effort, because prioritization turns analysis into a plan that can be executed. Value should be tied to mission outcomes, such as reducing downtime, reducing likelihood of data exposure, improving customer trust, or avoiding costly compliance failures. Risk should reflect the probability and impact of failures, and it should incorporate threat context and dependency fragility, not just internal preferences. Effort should include not only engineering work, but operational change management, training, and ongoing maintenance, because hidden effort is where plans break. This is also where sequencing matters, because some high-value fixes are blocked by prerequisites, like needing accurate asset inventory before you can enforce patch SLAs reliably. A practical prioritization approach balances quick wins with foundational investments, so you reduce exposure now while also building long-term capability. A prioritized list should be short enough that leaders can commit resources without spreading the organization thin.

With priorities set, craft actions with owners, milestones, and metrics so each improvement can be driven to closure rather than discussed indefinitely. Ownership must be assigned to the team that can actually deliver the change, with security acting as a partner and accountability layer rather than a distant requester. Milestones should be concrete checkpoints, such as completing a pilot, achieving coverage for a defined scope, validating a workflow, or updating evidence collection, and they should be realistic given operational load. Metrics should show progress and outcome impact, and they should be chosen carefully to avoid rewarding superficial activity. For example, counting the number of alerts is rarely a useful metric, but measuring reduction in false positives, reduction in time to triage, or improvement in containment speed can be meaningful. A well-formed action statement includes what will change, what success looks like, and how you will know it is working. When actions are defined at this level, teams can execute without ambiguity.

Communication of findings is where many reviews fail, because teams deliver jargon-heavy materials that hide the point and create resistance. The audience for the findings is not only security specialists, so write the summary in plain language that connects improvements to mission outcomes. Avoid acronyms unless you introduce them properly and then use them consistently, and even then prefer words that most professionals understand without translation. Keep the findings concise, because long decks and dense documents reduce engagement and increase the chance that leaders delegate reading to someone who lacks context. A simple communication pattern is to state the top strengths to preserve, the top gaps to close, and the top actions to execute, with clear rationale and expected benefits. The aim is not to impress; it is to create shared understanding and commitment. When people can repeat the conclusions accurately, you have communicated successfully.

Schedule reviews and hold teams accountable for closure so the process does not become an annual ritual with no operational impact. Scheduling should match the pace of change and risk, meaning higher-velocity environments need more frequent reviews than stable environments. Accountability should be built into normal governance, such as regular check-ins on milestone progress and outcome metrics, not separate reporting that adds overhead. Closure needs a definition, because without a closure standard teams declare victory when activity slows rather than when outcomes improve. Closure might mean a capability is deployed at defined coverage, validated in operations, and producing evidence that can be reviewed consistently. It also means the organization has absorbed the change through training, documentation, and support pathways, so it does not regress silently. When closure is explicit, the review process stops being a document exercise and becomes a capability improvement mechanism.

Re-check progress and adjust priorities as learning emerges, because improvement plans are hypotheses that reality will test. As you implement actions, you will discover constraints you did not predict, dependencies you did not account for, and side effects that require refinement. Re-checking progress should include reviewing metrics trends, sampling evidence quality, and collecting feedback from teams doing the work. If a prioritized action is not delivering the expected outcome, you should be willing to adjust approach rather than doubling down out of pride. Likewise, if a quick win produces unexpected momentum, you may decide to accelerate related improvements that compound value. Adjusting priorities does not mean abandoning discipline; it means using evidence to steer. The most mature programs treat the improvement plan as a living roadmap that is updated based on what the organization learns while changing.

To conclude, run one complete review cycle with disciplined objectives, evidence, and prioritization, and then publish the top actions in a form that teams can execute immediately. The value of gap and S W O T reviews is realized only when they produce concrete actions that are owned, measured, and closed, not when they produce a polished artifact. Lock your top strengths into the plan so they are protected and extended rather than accidentally weakened by change. Name your most important gaps in root-cause terms so fixes address the true sources of failure and drift. Publish the top actions with owners, milestones, and metrics so progress is visible and accountability is real. When you do this well, you replace vague improvement intentions with precise, mission-aligned execution, and the organization becomes more resilient with each review cycle rather than repeating the same lessons every year.