CEF FORCE™ – Enabling Business Success through Strategic Cybersecurity Leadership

Every CISO and security leader faces the same challenge: how do you connect business objectives to day-to-day cybersecurity activities in a way that produces measurable results?

Too often, strategies sound great in the boardroom but fail to deliver in practice. They get lost in translation, buried in technical silos, or slowed down by complex frameworks that require months of interpretation before anything changes.

The CEF FORCE™ Model was created to solve this problem. FORCE provides a simple, repeatable system for turning strategy into execution and execution into outcomes. It is the strategic leadership engine of the Cyber Enablement Framework (CEF) and the starting point for driving business-aligned security.

The FORCE Model™

At its core, FORCE is built on five leadership imperatives:

Focus on what matters most to your business – Security resources are limited; FORCE ensures you concentrate on the initiatives that directly support strategic goals and reduce the most impactful risks.
Orchestrate security operations – Break down silos by integrating operations across teams, functions, and technologies. Orchestration creates alignment between executives, architects, and operators, ensuring everyone is working from the same playbook.
Rapidly Deploy – Speed matters. FORCE emphasizes practical, quick-to-implement solution identification, design, and deployment processes that address real risks when you need to - NOW. Iteration and incremental delivery are built in.
Continuously Measure – Progress must be visible. FORCE drives the definition of metrics in both security and business terms, so leaders can track outcomes, adjust quickly, and demonstrate value to stakeholders.
Enable – Security should not be a blocker — it should enable organizational success. By aligning with business objectives, FORCE ensures that cybersecurity becomes a competitive advantage, not a cost center.

Why FORCE is Different

Where traditional approaches often leave leaders with abstract concepts or control checklists, FORCE provides a practical methodology that can be applied immediately.

It gives executives a way to prioritize and justify investments in terms of business value.
It helps architects and managers align execution with strategic intent.
It empowers operators to deliver quickly while still contributing to long-term goals.

In short, FORCE bridges the gap between the vision of leadership and the reality of operations.

Applying FORCE in Practice

Here’s how a security leader might begin using FORCE right away, illustrated with a single, consistent example:

Focus – Identify a critical business priority such as protecting customer trust during digital expansion. A top risk identified is account takeover targeting your customer portal.
Orchestrate – Bring together security, IT, customer experience, and product teams. Align them around the shared objective: reduce account compromise without creating friction for customers.
Rapidly Deploy – Launch a pilot program to enable multi-factor authentication (MFA) for high-risk customer accounts. Use CEF EVOLVE™ to drive the transformation. Keep scope small but meaningful — such as administrative and high risk accounts — so results can be observed quickly.
Continuously Measure – Track both security and business outcomes:These dual measurements show whether the initiative is delivering both protection and usability.
Enable – Share the outcome with leadership: “In three months, we reduced account takeover incidents by 60% in the pilot group, 82% of customers activated MFA, while customer support tickets related to logins dropped by 15%.” Use this proof point to expand MFA deployment across the broader customer base.

The Value of FORCE

By applying the FORCE model, CISOs and executives can:

✅ Establish clarity in security priorities

✅ Achieve integration across teams and silos

✅ Deliver visible wins that build credibility

✅ Quantify the value of cybersecurity to the business

✅ Position security as an enabler, not an obstacle

FORCE as Part of the CORE

FORCE doesn’t stand alone. It is the strategic leadership model within the CEF CORE™, working in concert with:

EVOLVE™ – A 6-phase lifecycle for driving transformation
OODA-SEC™ – A tactical loop for real-time adaptation and incident management
AXIS™ – An architectural foundation that ties strategy to controls

Together, these four models form a complete management system for modern cybersecurity leadership.

👉 Start now. Use FORCE to connect your strategy to execution and prove security’s value in business terms.

Register for access to extended FORCE materials, including executive briefings, templates, and use cases — and learn how to put FORCE into action across your entire security program.

⚡ CEF FORCE™ – The Strategic Engine of Cybersecurity Leadership.