Originally published on LinkedIn. Lightly edited for clarity.
Security controls are supposed to reduce risk, but they can backfire when they are deployed without operational context.
A control that blocks the business at the wrong moment or forces unsafe workarounds is not a win. It is just risk moved into a different shape.
Common ways security backfires
- Overly strict lockouts. Aggressive thresholds can trigger during incidents and lock out the people who need access most.
- Unplanned agent rollouts. Security agents that spike CPU or conflict with workloads can cause outages.
- Noisy detection rules. False positives create alert fatigue and make real incidents harder to see.
- Patch mandates without staging. Emergency patching without validation can introduce instability.
Each of these is a security control that created its own failure mode.
The real issue is incentives
When security makes the safe path slow, teams route around it.
Shared credentials, untracked exceptions, and ad-hoc scripts are all symptoms of control friction. The control is not wrong; the deployment model is.
Design controls like production systems
Effective controls behave like reliable services:
- Stage them in lower environments.
- Roll them out gradually.
- Monitor their impact on latency and error rates.
- Provide a break-glass path that is audited, not forbidden.
If a control cannot tolerate normal operational variance, it will fail during real incidents.
2026 Perspective
Security tooling is more integrated now, which helps, but the risk of operational blast radius remains.
The best programs treat security controls as systems with SLAs and failure modes. That mindset is still the difference between resilience and fragility.