For more than a decade now, organizations have been told the same story about cybersecurity. Invest in the right tools. Build the right dashboards. Achieve the right certifications. Visibility, we are promised, will lead to safety. And yet the opposite seems to be happening. Breaches continue. Teams burn out. Trust erodes quietly between executives and the technical leaders tasked with protecting the company.
This is the quiet crisis no dashboard can show. It feels less like catastrophe and more like exhaustion. Security teams feel unheard. Executives feel overwhelmed. Everyone feels vaguely defensive, as though the problem must be someone else’s fault.
Empiric Security was created in response to that gap. Not a gap in technology, but a gap in understanding. Its founder, Ryan Basden, did not set out to build another consultancy promising perfect protection. He built something narrower and, in many ways, more difficult: a practice devoted to translating risk between people who live on opposite sides of the same problem.
Dual Fluency in a Divided Industry
Basden rarely introduces himself by listing credentials. His story makes more sense when told through contrast. He has spent years inside adversarial hacker spaces, learning how systems actually fail and how attackers actually think. He has also spent years sitting with executives and boards, translating those realities into decisions leaders can act on.
That dual fluency, the ability to speak both technical and executive languages without condescension to either, is the defining feature of Empiric’s work. Basden learned early in his career that intimidation does not change behavior. Reports can be exhaustive and still be useless. A two-hundred-page penetration test means nothing if the organization cannot absorb it, prioritize it, or trust the person delivering it.
“I’ve handed companies hundreds of pages showing exactly how they could be compromised, and the hardest part was never the technical fixes,” Basden says. “It was watching people struggle with what those fixes meant for their roles, their power, and their sense of safety. That’s when I realized security failures are usually human long before they’re technical.”
What Empiric offers instead is translation. Not simplification, and not fear. Translation that respects the intelligence and constraints of everyone involved.
When Compliance Becomes a Comfort Blanket
Nowhere is that translation gap clearer than in the way organizations treat compliance. Frameworks like SOC 2, ISO 27001, and PCI DSS were designed as baselines. Over time, they have become substitutes for judgment.
In the mid-market especially, audit success is often equated with safety. The certificate becomes proof enough. Critical thinking quietly recedes. Teams focus on passing checks rather than understanding risk.
Basden is careful not to dismiss compliance outright. He sees it as a starting point, not a destination. The problem begins when compliance becomes a comfort blanket, something leadership clings to in order to avoid harder conversations. Empiric’s philosophy is blunt: compliance should support decision-making, not replace it.
The Burnout No One Wants to See
The cost of this confusion is most visible inside security teams themselves. Technical directors and CISOs often carry enormous responsibility with limited authority. They are expected to prevent incidents without being empowered to change the conditions that cause them.
Burnout, in this context, is not a personal failure. It is structural. It grows out of misaligned incentives, unclear communication, and a culture that treats people as interchangeable components in a risk equation.
Empiric often acts as an advocate in these moments. Basden gives technical leaders language they can use with executives, framing security issues not as abstract threats but as questions of operational continuity, financial exposure, and trust. When leaders understand the stakes, support follows. When they do not, exhaustion sets in.
Metrics That Actually Change Behavior
Most organizations already have metrics. What they lack is meaning. Vanity dashboards track activity without consequence. They impress no one and influence nothing.
Empiric reframes technical findings into narratives executives can use. Instead of counting vulnerabilities, Basden focuses on what happens if a system fails, who is affected, and how quickly the organization can recover. Clarity, not fear, is what earns buy-in. When leaders see how security choices intersect with revenue, reputation, and resilience, decisions change.
Founders and the Security Learning Curve
For startup founders, the relationship with security is often shaped by urgency. Speed matters. Credibility matters. Security is treated as something to bolt on later, once growth stabilizes.
Basden has seen how that mindset compounds risk. Early shortcuts scale just as efficiently as good habits. Empiric works with founders to strip away jargon without diluting rigor, positioning security as a trust-building asset rather than a necessary evil. Investors and enterprise customers do not expect perfection. They expect seriousness.
A Deliberately Different Consulting Model
Empiric’s structure is as intentional as its philosophy. In an industry dominated by large firms and templated deliverables, Basden chose a lean, senior-level advisory model. There are no layers to hide behind. No junior consultants delivering borrowed authority.
This choice limits scale, but it deepens impact. Trust is not a byproduct of Empiric’s work. It is the work. Clients engage not with a brand abstraction but with a person who has sat in the same uncomfortable seats they occupy.
Reimagining Security Leadership
Cybersecurity is often framed as a technical arms race. Better tools. Faster detection. Stronger controls. But the next era of security leadership may look quieter. More human. More ethical.
Basden’s work suggests that the future belongs to translators. People who can sit with discomfort. People who understand that fear is a poor motivator and that respect builds better systems than shame ever could.
Good security, as Empiric practices it, feels different inside an organization. Less reactive. Less adversarial. More honest. It is not louder than the noise of the industry. It is calmer. And that calm, in a world addicted to dashboards and alerts, may be the most radical signal of all.
To learn more about Empiric Security’s people-first advisory work, visit empiricsecurity.com.
