Sota is a Business Reporter client

Britain is facing a cyber-security reckoning – not just because threats are escalating, but because the traditional model of protection is breaking down.

Across the public and private sectors, organisations are confronting a level of cyber-risk that would have been unthinkable even five years ago. Attackers are no longer opportunistic, but operational. Ransomware groups operate like corporations. Credential theft is automated. Lateral movement across networks happens in minutes, not days.

But the most important shift is not the threat itself.

It is the growing recognition that many British organisations are paying enterprise-level prices for security, without receiving enterprise-level outcomes.

The illusion of protection

For more than a decade, the default response to rising cyber-risk has been to buy more. More endpoint protection. More network monitoring. More identity layers. More analytics dashboards.…