Amir Ebrahimi

A new year always brings a lot of talk about new tools, new threats, and new frameworks. That’s normal. But every year, I find it useful to step back and focus less on what’s new and more on what actually moves security forward in a meaningful way.

For me, the first priority going into the new year is visibility before sophistication. Many security programs struggle not because they lack advanced tools, but because they don’t have a clear picture of what’s happening in their environment. Logs that aren’t collected, endpoints that aren’t fully covered, and assets that aren’t clearly tracked create blind spots no amount of AI or automation can fix. If you can’t see it, you can’t protect it.

The second priority is reducing assumptions. A lot of incidents happen because something was trusted by default. A user account assumed to be benign, a script assumed to be safe, or an internal system assumed to be low risk. The more complex an environment becomes, the more dangerous those assumptions are. Moving toward explicit trust decisions, whether through tighter access controls or deny-by-default approaches, is one of the most effective ways to reduce risk.

Another focus for the new year is signal over noise. Alerts alone don’t equal security. Too many environments are flooded with alerts that lack context, ownership, or clear next steps. The goal shouldn’t be more alerts, but better ones. Alerts that tell a story, point to abnormal behavior, and help defenders make confident decisions quickly. Reducing noise is not lowering security. In many cases, it strengthens it.

I also think simplicity deserves more attention. Security architectures tend to grow organically, and over time they become hard to reason about. The new year is a good time to ask whether controls still make sense, whether tooling overlaps unnecessarily, and whether processes are understandable by the people expected to follow them. Simple systems fail more predictably and are easier to defend.

Finally, there’s the human side of security. Burnout is real, especially in defensive roles. Strong security programs don’t just protect systems, they protect the people operating them. Clear processes, realistic expectations, and room to pause and reflect are not weaknesses. They’re part of long-term resilience.

Going into the new year, my focus isn’t on chasing every new trend. It’s on fundamentals. Visibility, clarity, intentional trust, and systems that make sense. Those priorities don’t expire, and they matter just as much on day one of the year as they do on the last.