January 2025
The cost of Pigeonholing in Cybersecurity
Humans have always had a habit of sorting and labeling everything around us. From the earliest tribes to modern data scientists, we organize the world into neat categories: race, gender, religion, politics, and even library books through the Dewey Decimal System. It’s understandable because in a complex world, classification makes life simpler.
But when marketing gets involved, our instinct to categorize can go too far, and nowhere is that clearer than in cybersecurity.
When “Firewall” Was Enough
Not long ago, the term firewall had a simple, universal meaning: software that blocks unwanted network traffic, much like a physical firewall blocks flames and smoke.
Early firewalls were primitive, filtering only by IP address or protocol. Then came stateful firewalls that tracked connections, allowing smarter control over which packets were allowed through.
Regardless of how advanced they became, they were still just called firewalls. Everyone understood what that meant.
Enter the Buzzwords
Then marketing teams got creative. A vendor added basic content inspection and pattern matching and branded it as something new: Unified Threat Management (UTM). If you still used a “firewall,” you were told your technology was outdated.
Soon after came another rebrand: Next Generation Firewall (NGFW), with deeper traffic analysis. Once again, the industry message was that last year’s acronym wasn’t enough.
And it didn’t stop there. We’ve since seen a flood of new labels: SIEM, EDR, XDR, MDR, SASE, WAF, SOAR, SECaaS, SD-WAN, and the list goes on. Threats themselves have also been carved into endless micro-categories: ransomware, rootkits, zero-days, keyloggers, adware, trojans, worms, droppers, and more.
It’s no wonder that even seasoned professionals feel dizzy trying to keep up.
The Truth Behind the Acronyms
Let’s be honest: most of those terms are marketing fluff.
Ask an everyday business owner what they need for cybersecurity, and they’ll likely say “a firewall.” And while that’s an oversimplification, it’s not entirely wrong.
Real security doesn’t come from chasing the next shiny acronym. It comes from following a clear, disciplined process:
Adopt a cybersecurity framework such as NIST, CIS, PCI DSS, ISO 27001/27002, or CMMC.
Deploy a technology platform that meets the framework’s requirements.
Monitor and manage that platform continuously, whether in-house or through a trusted managed security provider like NBUSA.
Even today, around 80% of breaches occur because known protections weren’t in place. The remaining 20% usually trace back to a misconfigured or unmonitored system. The fundamentals haven’t changed; only the buzzwords have.
