Growing organisations treat regulatory compliance as a cost centre. A brake on growth. Something to endure rather than deploy.
That view is expensive, the organisations winning contracts, accelerating M&A and protecting revenue momentum see regulation differently. They treat compliance as operating discipline. A forcing function that cuts through internal paralysis and creates repeatable, scalable ways of working.
Here's the pattern we see across ambitious organisations that grow faster, sell more easily and recover quicker when things go wrong.
Regulatory pressure cuts through internal debate. When a board has to evidence risk ownership, incident response, access control or supplier assurance, decisions finally get made. Result: fewer legacy systems, clearer accountability and less operational drag. That alone improves execution speed.
Boards that break paralysis do three things they often avoid. They name a single accountable owner, not a committee. They accept trade-offs explicitly, including retiring some legacy integrations rather than deferring them. They time-box the outcome to reach “regulator defensible” in 90 days, not perfection.
When this happens, audit preparation time reduces, integration work becomes faster because identity is no longer bespoke, security alerts drop because permissions are tighter and the board has a dashboard it trusts.
Regulatory pressure turns “we should” into “we must” and gives leadership cover to make uncomfortable decisions without endless consensus-building.
Compliance does not magically create capability. It removes excuses.
Deals do not usually die. They stall. When compliance is clean, evidence is current, controls are repeatable, ownership is clear and responses are consistent, the commercial needle moves in three measurable places.
Security Due Diligence Time Drops Materially
Typical baseline in enterprise sales runs 3 to 8 weeks of back and forth. With clean compliance, that often compresses to 1 to 3 weeks. Net effect: 2 to 5 weeks shaved off the deal cycle, mainly by avoiding second and third rounds of questioning.
Fewer Deal-Blocking Exceptions and Fewer Legal Redlines
The biggest time sink is not the first questionnaire. It is the escalations: no MFA, no logging, no incident process, unclear sub-processors, no data retention rules. Clean compliance reduces exceptions, which reduces legal and procurement churn. Not just speed but higher close probability.
Faster Onboarding After Signature
Even if the contract signs, onboarding can stall if access models, audit trails and data handling are not standardised. Clean compliance tends to cut onboarding by days to weeks, depending on the buyer.
That is exactly how compliance creates revenue impact. It protects momentum.
Competitive advantage exists after the regulation is clear but before it is enforced at scale. That window is 12 to 24 months before the deadline. Not at the deadline.
NIS2 has the potential to impact over 160,000 companies across the EU and indirectly extend its reach to UK firms. (Dataguard.com) Non-compliance can lead to fines of up to €10 million or 2% of global turnover for essential entities. DORA entered into application on 17 January 2025, harmonising digital operational resilience requirements for approximately 22,000 financial entities across the EU, with fines up to 10% of annual turnover or €10 million for serious breaches.
Buyers, partners and regulators start asking harder questions but cannot yet assume baseline maturity. Firms that are ready here stand out immediately, answer diligence cleanly while competitors scramble and are seen as lower-friction, lower-risk counterparties.
What early movers gain in that window: sales velocity, supplier preference, pricing power and strategic trust. Deals do not say “you won because of NIS2 readiness”. They say “this one felt easier”. That is the edge.
Late movers do not just lose advantage. They pay a penalty. Compliance becomes rushed and expensive. Decisions are made under time stress, vendors are chosen defensively and shortcuts are taken that create long-term drag. You pay more and get less.
When everyone else has clean answers and you do not, your deals stall, your buyers escalate and your teams look disorganised. You are not non-compliant. You are slow. That is worse commercially.
Late compliance signals weak governance, reactive leadership and poor execution discipline. That perception sticks long after you “catch up”.
The global average cost of a data breach in 2024 was $4.88 million, a 10% increase over 2023 and the highest total ever. Financial firms had the second highest breach cost of any industry, with costs reaching $375 million when 50 million records or more were compromised. The cost of business disruption, productivity losses, revenue losses and fines is 2.71 times the cost of compliance. (IBM.com)
The model is strong but it is not universal. There are places where early compliance investment does not pay off.
Purely price-led, low-trust markets where buyers optimise almost entirely on price and speed:
Security questionnaires are minimal or nonexistent. Compliance maturity is invisible to the buying decision. Clean compliance does not shorten sales cycles, protect pricing or increase win rate. If you over-invest early, you simply raise your cost base.
Organisations with very short deal cycles and low switching friction:
Sales cycles measured in days, not months. Low contract values. Minimal onboarding or integration. If there is no formal due diligence, there is no momentum to protect. Compliance becomes relevant only when the firm moves upmarket.
Firms with no credible near-term regulatory exposure:
No personal data of consequence, no operational dependency for regulated buyers, no realistic path into regulated supply chains within 2 to 3 years. You end up building controls for scrutiny that never comes. The work is real, the benefit is hypothetical.
Leadership teams that cannot execute change:
No clear accountability, chronic decision avoidance, culture optimised for consensus over outcomes. Regulation forces decisions. If leadership cannot make them, money gets spent on tools, not outcomes. Complexity increases, teams get frustrated and nothing actually improves.
Where, in the next 24 months, will trust slow us down? If there is no clear answer, do not overbuild, do not gold-plate compliance and focus on baseline security hygiene. If there is a clear answer, waiting is usually the most expensive option.
Having Microsoft licences puts you on the pitch. Using the security stack properly is what makes you match-fit. The gap between the two is not tooling. It is operationalisation.
Most firms sit in this position: “We own E3 or E5. We have switched some things on. We assume we are covered.” They are not.
Features are enabled but not enforced:
MFA enabled with weak exclusions and legacy protocols still allowed. Conditional Access exists but policies are generic and not risk-based. Microsoft Defender XDR is deployed but alerts are noisy and largely ignored. Regulators do not care that controls exist. They care that controls consistently reduce risk.
Identity is not treated as the primary control plane:
Most compliance failures trace back to identity. Multiple admin roles with standing privileges, no just-in-time access, infrequent or manual access reviews and poor third-party access controls. Until identity is designed as the backbone, firms struggle to answer: “Who has access, why, and how fast can we remove it?” That is a red flag in every regulatory regime.
Logging exists but no one trusts it:
Logs are enabled, data is there, but no one is confident it is complete, retained properly or reviewable under pressure. When something goes wrong, firms cannot reconstruct timelines quickly, evidence response quality or prove containment. Logging without confidence is just storage cost.
Incident response is theoretical, not executable:
Many firms have an IR policy, a runbook template and a vague escalation flow. What they do not have is tested workflows, realistic access removal and clarity on decision ownership. Microsoft tooling supports this but it does not force it. Regulators spot this instantly.
Phase 1: Stabilise and enforce the basics (0–90 days):
Tighten Conditional Access properly, remove legacy authentication, implement privileged access controls and reduce alert noise to something usable. At this point risk drops materially.
Phase 2: Make it regulator-defensible (3–6 months):
Align controls to specific regulatory requirements, standardise evidence, automate access reviews and make incident response executable, not aspirational. This is where compliance stops being fragile.
Phase 3: Make it commercially useful (6–12 months):
Build repeatable responses for diligence, integrate security into onboarding and M&A playbooks and give the board metrics it trusts. This is where momentum protection kicks in.
Licences reduce cost of tooling:
They do not reduce cost of indecision. Most firms delay not because Microsoft cannot do it, but because no one owns the outcome, trade-offs are avoided and “good enough” is never clearly defined.
If you cannot show something concrete in 90 days, the programme is already in trouble. When a CEO asks “what can we show in 90 days that proves this is working”, use one primary metric and three supporting proof points.
Primary 90-Day Metric:
Time to produce a complete, consistent security response on first request. Measured from “we have received a security or compliance questionnaire” to “here is a complete, approved, defensible response”.
Target in 90-Days:
From days or weeks of scramble to same day or next business day.
That single metric proves controls are known, ownership is clear, evidence is centralised and answers are consistent. If you can do this, compliance is no longer fragile.
Why This Works With Boards:
It is binary, it maps directly to sales momentum and it predicts audit and incident performance. Boards understand the implication fast. If you can answer cleanly and quickly, you do not slow things down.
3 Supporting 90-Day Proof Points
Privileged Access Exposure Reduced: Fewer standing admin accounts, clear just-in-time access and named owners. Easy to evidence and popular with regulators.
Security Alert Volume Reduced To Something Human: Fewer alerts, higher signal and clear triage ownership. Boards do not care about tool counts. They care that noise is under control.
One Credible Incident Response Walkthrough. Not a Tabletop Theatre Exercise: A real, timed walkthrough showing detection, access removal, escalation and decision ownership. If that works, confidence goes up fast.
In 90 days, you will be able to answer hard questions without panicking. That is a credible early win. Once boards see that, trust in the programme increases, funding conversations change and longer-term milestones stop feeling abstract.
Make one person accountable for commercially useful compliance and give them the authority to say no. Not a programme. Not a committee. Not a steering group. One named executive.
On Monday morning, the CEO should say: “You own making our compliance defensible, repeatable and commercially useful. Your success is measured by speed and clarity, not audits passed.”
Then do the hard part. Give them authority across IT, security, risk and procurement, back them when they retire legacy access, systems or processes and protect them from consensus drag. Without that, everything else is theatre.
Every failure traces back to this being missing. Nobody can force trade-offs, “later” becomes the default answer and tools get bought instead of decisions being made. Regulation does not fail firms. Diffused accountability does.
Once one owner exists, three things happen immediately. Decisions surface. The questions people have been avoiding come into the open fast. Scope becomes real. Work stops expanding to include everything and starts focusing on what actually removes friction. Momentum appears early because someone is finally paid to protect it.
Good candidates: COO, CIO with real authority or CISO who understands sales and operations. Bad candidates: a committee, internal audit or a junior compliance lead with no leverage. This role is about execution, not documentation.
If everyone owns compliance, no one can make it useful. Make the ownership decision first. Everything else finally has somewhere to land.
Ambitious firms are moving from “compliance as protection” to “compliance as permission”. That change explains a lot of what we are seeing.
Historically, boards thought about regulation like this: avoid fines, avoid headlines, avoid personal exposure. Security and compliance sat in the background. Necessary, defensive, inert. That model is breaking.
Friction now shows up at buyer assurance gates, supplier risk assessments, platform and ecosystem requirements, cyber insurance conditions and regulator-driven contractual clauses.
Compliance maturity is increasingly the thing that grants permission to enter a market, bid on a contract, integrate an acquisition and scale without renegotiation. Firms are not investing to be safe. They are investing to be allowed.
The recurring mistake is treating compliance as a standard to reach. It is a posture to sustain. The question is not “are we compliant”. The better question is “can we stay compliant while we change”.
That is why many firms pass audits and still struggle commercially. Their posture collapses under growth, M&A or platform change.
The most effective organisations are designing compliance around change, not around controls. That means identity models that survive acquisitions, logging that survives platform shifts, incident response that works during disruption and evidence that updates automatically. This is less about tools and more about operating model.
We are seeing a split. One group treat regulation as something to finish, optimise for audits and freeze once “done”. The other treat regulation as a standing capability, optimise for speed, trust and resilience and use it to absorb growth without breaking.
That divide will matter more than sector, size or budget over the next few years.
The future cost of compliance is not the controls. It is the friction you did not design out early. That is the conversation most firms are about to have.
If you want to turn regulation into momentum protection, start with one decision and one metric.
The Decision: Name one accountable owner by end of week. Give them authority to make trade-offs, retire legacy systems and say no to consensus drag. Measure their success by speed and clarity, not audit scores.
The Metric: Track time to produce a complete security response on first request. Measure from questionnaire received to defensible answer delivered. Target same day or next business day within 90 days.
If you cannot answer that question cleanly today, you are already absorbing friction in your pipeline. That friction compounds every quarter.
CyberOne helps growing firms close the gap between owning Microsoft licences and being compliance-ready. We align controls to regulatory requirements, standardise evidence and make incident response executable in 90 days. If you want to see where momentum is leaking in your deals, book a 30-minute compliance readiness review.
Compliance is not about avoiding bad outcomes. It is about avoiding slow ones.