For a long time, my day-to-day job felt like I was trapped in a loop of alerts, tickets, and mini-fires that needed putting out. We’d just catch our breath from one urgent need / fire when the next one would land. At some point, it hit me—we weren’t defending, we were surviving just barely shifting from one issue to the next.
That realization started a shift in how I thought about running a security program. It wasn’t overnight, and it wasn’t all at once, but I knew we had to move away from being purely reactive. We needed to get ahead of the threats.
What Proactive Security Actually Looks Like
A lightbulb moment for me came during a Cyber Dawn exercise—a joint event between FEMA Region IX, the California Military Department, and Cal OES. We were simulating a large-scale cyber event, and the message was loud and clear: you can’t rely on perimeter defenses alone anymore. The old “defense-in-depth” model just doesn’t cut it when attackers are faster, sneakier, and more embedded than ever.
What stood out most was the emphasis on operationalizing threat hunting. Not just a cool buzzword—but a real, structured practice. When you embed that into your team’s rhythm, you start spotting the subtle stuff: the behaviors that don’t quite fit, the privilege escalation that’s just a little too slick. That’s where behavioral analytics becomes game-changing. These days, with AI stacking on top of detection logic, it’s not just identifying the anomaly—it’s giving you the story behind it. That context used to take hours of log diving. Now, it’s at your fingertips.
And while purple teaming isn’t new, what is new is the level of collaboration it enables. When red and blue teams stop operating in silos and start working side-by-side, magic happens. Yes, it takes time. Yes, it requires the right people or the right vendor. But it’s one of the most honest ways to measure how ready your program really is.
How to Tell When You’re Stuck in Reactive Mode
There’s a telltale sound in a reactive security program—it’s the constant hum of urgency. Everything’s a fire. Every day starts with “what broke overnight.” You’re not planning for tomorrow because you’re too busy surviving today.
I remember watching our mean time to respond (MTTR) stretch into uncomfortable territory. Not because we were lazy or unskilled, but because we weren’t aligned. Playbooks were outdated. Roles weren’t clear. Nobody had time for a tabletop exercise because they were too busy dealing with the last incident. It was death by alert fatigue—and a lot of that was our own doing. We hadn’t tuned the detections in a while. We were accepting noise as the cost of doing business as we were working to keep up with all the new things coming down the pike.
And then there were the mystery responsibilities—things our team had somehow absorbed that weren’t actually ours. Vulnerability scans? Patch validation for third-party systems? Asset inventory cleanup? All important, but they didn’t belong to us. Still, we were spending time on them, and it was coming at the expense of doing the things that actually improved our the programming portions our team was purely responsible for.
Making the Shift (Without Overhauling Everything)
I used to think being “proactive” meant you had to be operating at some elite, unicorn-level maturity. Like you had to graduate from being reactive before you could even think about threat modeling or red teaming.
That’s not true.
You don’t need permission to start being proactive. You just need a bit of space. That might mean carving out one afternoon a month to sit down and review a playbook. Or running a quick “what if” scenario over lunch. Or pulling in cross-functional partners for a tabletop to walk through how a ransomware event would play out.
In fact, these small efforts often pay the biggest dividends. They break the cycle. They give your team a sense of control again. And they spark the kind of thinking that leads to bigger wins down the line.
Threat Intel and Threat Hunting: Your Proactive Wingmen
When people think about threat intelligence, they often imagine big budgets, fancy tools, or expensive feeds. But that’s only one flavor.
You can start simple. I’ve seen teams stand up internal MISP instances in a weekend, feeding in open-source indicators and even publishing your own internal observables. Once you start collecting and organizing this data, it naturally leads to better hunting. You know what to look for. You start asking smarter questions. You no longer hunt yourself into a circle.
One model I’ve seen work really well is the threat hunting shift rotation. This operates similar to an on-call where each analyst takes a turn—maybe a week at a time—where they’re free from ticket queues and monitoring dashboards. Their job? Go find something weird. Anything. It’s a low-pressure way to build that muscle, and it brings a bit of curiosity back into the work.
You don’t need a flashy toolset to start. You just need the intent—and a little bit of breathing room.
Final Thoughts
At the end of the day, moving from reactive to proactive isn’t about flipping a switch. It’s about asking, “What could we do today that helps us avoid tomorrow’s fire?” And then carving out just enough time to do it.
Because the more you plan, model, hunt, and test before something bad happens, the better you respond when it inevitably does.
And trust me—it feels a lot better to find something first than to read about it in a breach notification.
