Why even bother…

With the rapid evolution of European laws and regulations concerning cybersecurity and information risk management — such as the NIS2 Directive, the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), and the GDPR — it is essential for organizations to stay fully informed and proactively adapt. These frameworks are not just legal obligations; they shape how organizations manage digital threats, resilience, and governance.

Failing to align with these regulations can lead to hefty fines, reputational damage, and operational disruptions. More importantly, these laws often reflect best practices in cybersecurity and risk governance, offering a blueprint for stronger internal controls, supply chain security, and incident response readiness.

Therefore, organizations must not only monitor legal developments but also translate regulatory requirements into actionable internal policies, procedures, and awareness initiatives. This includes updating technical measures, enhancing reporting mechanisms, and fostering a risk-aware culture across all levels of the organization. A structured compliance and risk governance process helps ensure readiness, reduce exposure, and demonstrate due diligence to regulators, partners, and customers alike.

The necessity

Hence, the importance of security roadmapping: the structured practice of answering the critical question, “How are we going to comply with a specific regulation?” In our line of work, these questions are business-as-usual — but that doesn’t mean they’re simple. Quite the opposite. Addressing them requires navigating a complex, dynamic environment in which legal, technical, and organizational perspectives converge.

Security roadmapping involves more than ticking boxes for compliance. It requires translating abstract regulatory requirements into concrete actions, aligning them with business objectives, timelines, and resource constraints. Every stakeholder has different priorities — legal wants coverage, IT seeks feasibility, and the business side often hesitates to invest heavily unless the value is clear. This creates a challenging balancing act between strategic intent and operational execution.

Effective roadmapping is, therefore, both a technical and political exercise: identifying the gaps, proposing actionable steps, negotiating buy-in, and ensuring that limited resources are deployed where they matter most. It’s about turning complexity into clarity — and setting a realistic, risk-based course toward compliance and resilience.

But, how?

As mentioned earlier, roadmapping involves various steps:

Step 0 (pre-requisite) is; know what you’re talking about. Before you start roadmapping, it is important that you have a good understanding of what the law, regulation or standard is about. The NIS2, for example,