Certified: The GIAC GSTRT Audio Course

In this episode, we move from assessment and analysis into the part that leadership actually needs in order to act: a prioritized set of improvements with crisp rationale and clear business value. Most organizations do not struggle to generate ideas. They struggle to decide what matters most, what can be delivered with available capacity, and what will measurably improve mission outcomes. A strong recommendation package makes those choices easier by being specific, defensible, and grounded in outcomes rather than preferences. It also respects that leaders are balancing competing priorities, so your job is to reduce ambiguity and present tradeoffs clearly. The aim is not to win an argument. The aim is to earn approval for the right work and to create momentum that delivers visible risk reduction and operational benefit.

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.

Begin by compiling candidate actions from your assessments and incidents, because recommendations should reflect both planned improvement and lived experience. Assessments reveal structural gaps, maturity weaknesses, and control coverage issues that can quietly increase risk over time. Incidents reveal where controls failed under pressure, where detection lagged, where response bottlenecks emerged, and where dependencies created surprise. When you combine these sources, you avoid the trap of chasing only the most recent incident while ignoring foundational weaknesses, and you also avoid the trap of building a perfect roadmap that ignores the reality of how failures actually occur. Candidate actions should be captured in a consistent format, such as what will change, what outcome it improves, and what evidence supports the need. Consistency matters because it allows fair comparison and prevents the loudest stakeholder from dominating. A good compilation step produces a list that is broad enough to capture options, but structured enough to be triaged quickly.

Once you have candidate actions, group them into themes like reliability, risk reduction, efficiency, and compliance, because themes create a narrative that leaders can understand and repeat. Reliability recommendations focus on keeping critical services stable, recoverable, and resilient under failure, which often aligns strongly with business priorities. Risk recommendations focus on reducing the likelihood or impact of high-consequence events, such as unauthorized access to sensitive systems, data exposure, or ransomware disruption. Efficiency recommendations focus on reducing toil, simplifying operations, and improving cycle time, which often frees capacity for higher-value work. Compliance recommendations focus on evidence strength, control consistency, and readiness for audits or contractual obligations, which reduces business exposure to penalties and reputational harm. The value of themes is not categorization for its own sake, but clarity about what kind of benefit each action is designed to deliver. Themes also help you identify redundancies, where multiple actions target the same outcome and can be combined or sequenced.

After themes are clear, score each candidate using a small set of factors such as value, cost, risk reduction, and feasibility. Value should be expressed in business terms, like reduced downtime, reduced incident impact, improved customer trust, faster delivery with fewer rollbacks, or reduced audit remediation. Cost should include not only spend, but staff time, opportunity cost, and ongoing maintenance, because low purchase cost can still mean high operational burden. Risk reduction should connect to threat realities and impact thresholds, not just generic risk statements, and it should reflect both probability and consequence. Feasibility should include dependencies, skill availability, timing windows, and the organization’s ability to absorb change without destabilizing operations. The scoring scale does not need to be perfect, but it must be applied consistently, and it must be anchored in evidence rather than in optimism. Scoring is a tool to support decisions, not a shield to avoid accountability, so keep it transparent and explainable.

With scores in place, build a simple priority matrix that turns numbers into a decision view, and add tie-breaker rules so the process does not stall when items score similarly. A priority matrix is useful when it makes tradeoffs visible, such as high value and high feasibility items rising to the top, while high value but low feasibility items become candidates for phased planning. Tie-breaker rules matter because you will often find clusters of actions that look equally attractive on paper. A practical tie-breaker might be mission criticality, meaning actions that protect the highest-impact outcomes win. Another tie-breaker might be dependency unlocking, where an action that enables multiple downstream improvements is prioritized because it compounds value. You can also use timing as a tie-breaker, such as aligning work with planned platform refreshes to reduce implementation cost and disruption. The key is that tie-breakers are stated before debate begins, so the process feels fair rather than political. When the matrix and tie-breakers are simple, the leadership conversation becomes faster and more decisive.

Now draft a one-sentence rationale for each recommendation, because that sentence is often what leaders will repeat when approving, funding, and communicating the work. A good rationale includes the action, the primary business outcome, and the reason it matters now, all in plain language. It should avoid jargon and avoid vague claims like improving security posture, because those phrases do not help leaders make decisions. A rationale should be strong enough that if it were read alone, a reasonable executive would understand what they are approving and why it matters. This one sentence also helps you test whether the recommendation is truly crisp, because if you cannot describe the value in one sentence, the scope may be unclear or the benefit may be speculative. Keep the sentence aligned to one primary outcome, even if there are secondary benefits, because mixing too many benefits makes the rationale feel unfocused. A library of clear rationales also makes it easier to produce consistent communication later.

To make this concrete, consider an example recommendation to consolidate tooling in a domain where overlapping products create cost, complexity, and inconsistent workflows. Tool sprawl often increases risk because it fragments telemetry, creates inconsistent alert handling, and increases the chances that a control is assumed to exist when it is only partially deployed. It also increases operational burden, because teams spend time maintaining connectors, tuning duplicate detections, and training new staff across multiple interfaces. Consolidation can reduce licensing cost, reduce operational complexity, and improve response consistency by standardizing workflows and evidence capture. The risk is that consolidation can disrupt operations if done abruptly, so the recommendation must include a phased migration plan and clear success measures. The business value is not merely saving money, but also improving reliability and reducing the chance of missing critical signals due to fragmentation. When framed this way, consolidation becomes a mission support initiative rather than a purely technical cleanup.

After you have rationales, model outcomes so leaders can see what improvement looks like in tangible terms. Outcomes might include cost savings from reduced licenses and reduced maintenance load, resilience improvements such as higher recovery success rates or reduced outage duration, and cycle-time improvements such as faster onboarding of systems into monitoring or faster completion of access reviews. Modeling does not require perfect forecasting, but it should provide credible ranges tied to baselines, such as reducing mean time to contain by a measurable percentage or reducing the number of tools that require separate tuning and review. Outcome modeling also helps you detect recommendations that sound attractive but have unclear payoff, which prevents wasted effort later. It is important to connect modeled outcomes to the metrics leaders already care about, because that increases the chance the improvements will be monitored and sustained. When outcomes are described in plain terms and tied to measurable signals, leaders can make investment decisions with more confidence.

Recommendations should also identify dependencies, owners, and earliest start dates, because priority without execution detail often results in stalled initiatives. Dependencies can include platform migrations, identity foundation work, procurement lead times, data quality prerequisites, or the availability of a specific engineering team. Owners should be the teams that can deliver the change, with security acting as a partner and governance function, because ownership without delivery authority is a recipe for delays. Earliest start dates should consider change windows, training cycles, and ongoing obligations like audits and incident response readiness, because starting at the wrong time can turn a good recommendation into operational chaos. This information also helps leaders understand which items can start immediately and which require preparatory work. It is better to be explicit about sequencing than to promise simultaneous execution across a dozen initiatives. When dependencies and start timing are clear, the improvement plan becomes believable.

A common pitfall is gold-plated fixes that are technically elegant but lack measurable payoff, and they drain capacity from work that would move outcomes. Gold-plated fixes often appear in the form of over-engineered architectures, overly broad re-platforming, or complex automation that takes months to build and is fragile in practice. They tend to promise future flexibility without delivering near-term risk reduction, which makes them hard to defend when priorities shift. The antidote is insisting on measurable outcomes and clear success criteria before committing significant resources. If an initiative cannot articulate what will improve, how it will be measured, and why the organization needs it now, it should be scaled down, phased, or deferred. This does not mean avoiding ambitious work, but it means tying ambition to outcomes and sustainment capacity. In security, elegance is only valuable when it improves reliability and reduces risk in the real operating environment.

Quick wins are useful not as distractions, but as capacity multipliers that free time and reduce noise so higher-value work can succeed. A classic example is retiring redundant reports that nobody reads, which is more important than it sounds because reporting overhead quietly consumes skilled time. If analysts spend hours generating reports for compliance theater rather than for decision-making, you lose capacity for detection tuning, incident readiness, and evidence improvement. Retiring reports also forces a healthier discipline, where remaining reporting is tied to decisions and outcomes rather than tradition. This kind of quick win can be positioned as an efficiency improvement that also increases clarity, because leaders see fewer dashboards but get higher-signal information. It also sets a tone that the improvement plan is willing to stop doing low-value work, not only add new obligations. In overloaded environments, removing load is sometimes the highest-value action you can take.

When you present recommendations, prepare objections and offer credible, risk-aware alternatives, because objections are usually about constraints and tradeoffs rather than about rejecting security. Common objections include insufficient staffing, competing business deadlines, fear of operational disruption, or skepticism about whether benefits will materialize. Your response should acknowledge the constraint and present options, such as phased implementation, narrower initial scope, compensating controls, or sequencing that aligns with existing projects to reduce cost. Alternatives should be risk-aware, meaning you do not pretend that deferral is free, and you clearly describe what risk remains and how it will be monitored. This approach builds trust because it shows you are not trying to force a single solution regardless of reality. It also helps leaders make explicit decisions about risk acceptance versus investment, which is often the real decision hiding behind objections. When you bring alternatives, you turn resistance into a structured tradeoff conversation.

As a mini recap, a strong recommendation package includes options drawn from evidence, scored consistently, summarized with crisp rationales, and supported by dependency and benefit clarity. Options come from assessments and incidents so they reflect both planned maturity and real failure patterns. Scores reflect value, cost, risk reduction, and feasibility, applied with simple tie-breakers to prevent paralysis. Rationales are one sentence each, written in plain language, tied to mission outcomes and business value. Dependencies, owners, and earliest start dates convert priorities into an executable sequence. Benefits are modeled in credible ranges tied to baselines so leaders can monitor progress. This package should also identify quick wins that reclaim capacity and guard against gold-plated efforts that do not pay off. When all of these elements are present, leadership can approve work quickly and the organization can execute with less confusion.

To conclude, publish your top five recommendations with their one-sentence rationales and the outcome metrics you will use to track value, and then request a defined approval window so the plan can move into execution. A defined approval window matters because priorities drift when decisions are left open-ended, and open-ended decisions are where initiatives die quietly. The published top five should be framed as a focused set of improvements that deliver measurable business value, not as a comprehensive wishlist. They should include sequencing notes so leaders understand what can start now versus what requires preparation, and they should include a commitment to review progress against baselines so leadership can steer investment as learning emerges. When you present prioritized improvements this way, you make it easier for the business to say yes, and you make it harder for the work to dissolve into unowned ambition. That is how security recommendations become funded, executed, and translated into real mission resilience.