From Report to Results: Making Sense of Your Cyber Security Report

You’ve just had a Pentest, ISO audit or cyber review. The report lands and the clock starts ticking.

But here’s the truth: for a lot of teams, this is where momentum quietly dies. You’re left staring at a long list of technical issues, patch recommendations, and risk scores — with no clear route to action. It’s easy to feel stuck.

We’ve worked with a lot of organisations in this exact moment — unsure where to begin, what matters most or how to explain it to the wider business.

Here are 10 practical things we suggest keeping in mind after your report lands — to help you turn findings into meaningful outcomes.

1. Focus on what matters to your business
Not all findings are created equal. Ask: What could genuinely impact operations, reputation or revenue? That’s your priority — not necessarily what’s top of the report.

2. Translate technical into business terms
Your board won’t care about CVSS scores — but they’ll care if client data is at risk or if downtime could hit revenue. Turn findings into simple, relatable language.

3. Find and act on quick wins
Some fixes are buried gems: a 10-minute policy change or a simple config tweak. Identifying and acting on those quickly can build momentum — and show early progress to stakeholders.

4. Map risk to likelihood and impact
Avoid panic-fixing every item. Focus on things that are both likely and damaging. A low-severity finding on a critical system may be more important than a high-rated one on something isolated.

5. Look at what your tools can already do
Many teams already own the tools to solve key issues — they’re just underused or not configured right. Before buying anything new, check your existing stack.

6. Prioritise realistically
You can’t fix everything at once — and you don’t need to. Build a clear, staged roadmap based on what’s feasible with your current time, team and budget. Ask
How bad is it if this goes wrong?
How likely is it to be exploited?
How hard is it to fix?

7. Sense-check third-party recommendations
Some reports are written to cover every base. Be prepared to challenge or validate suggestions — especially if they feel generic or not tailored to your environment.

8. Think beyond compliance checkboxes
It’s easy to focus on ticking boxes — especially with frameworks like ISO 27001 or Cyber Essentials. But strong security is more than just passing an audit. Look at what matters, not just what’s required.

9. Get buy-in beyond IT
If you need budget or support, involve stakeholders early. Frame the conversation around business impact — not just security.

10. Don’t try to go it alone
Whether it’s time, resource or headspace you’re short on — getting outside help to review findings, validate plans or just sense-check your thinking can make a real difference & save weeks/months of confusion.

Need a sounding board?
As you will probably guess, when we complete a security review, pen test or audit for any of our customers this is always backed up with a detailed meeting (Virtual or F2F) to deep dive into the report and ensure there are no what now’s?

However, if you have report from another source and are feeling a little lost, we help businesses of all sizes make sense of their security reports — from translating findings to planning next steps and avoiding common pitfalls.

If you’ve got a report sitting in your inbox and aren’t sure where to start, feel free to get in touch. No hard sell — just a straightforward conversation to see if we can help.

solutions@it-b.co.uk – we’ll take it from there.