The question hangs heavy in every hallway conversation among peers, whispered but rarely acknowledged outright: Is the CISO role becoming unsustainable?

The expanding weight of the title

What began as a technical leadership role has evolved into one of the most politically charged, legally risky, and emotionally taxing jobs in the C-suite. Today’s CISO is expected to be part strategist, part technologist, part lawyer, part diplomat, and part therapist – all while managing a function that, by definition, can never declare complete success.

When marketing or sales miss their numbers, they regroup and adjust. When security misses, the company makes all the wrong headlines, customers lose trust, and regulators come knocking. The asymmetry of consequence is staggering.

And as digital transformation accelerates, that asymmetry is widening. More code means more risk. More AI adoption means new, untested threat models. More regulation means more scrutiny. And the CISO is the focal point for all of it – a single name attached to a problem no single person can ever fully control.

Accountability without authority

One of the defining frustrations of the CISO role is that it comes with massive accountability but limited authority. You’re held responsible for risks you don’t own, for assets you don’t control, and for decisions made by people who outrank you.

Sure, you can advise, influence, and advocate, but you can’t always enforce. And when a breach happens, it’s your name that ends up in the press release, not the executive’s who deprioritized funding or ignored warnings.

That’s not a complaint, by the way, it’s reality. The CISO role is structurally conflicted. We are asked to secure innovation without slowing it, be risk-averse in a business culture that rewards speed, and to communicate technical nuance in boardrooms that crave binary answers.

It’s no wonder burnout is rampant. Many CISOs quietly describe their jobs as unsustainable marathons, with constant pressure, little rest, and the creeping sense that even when you do everything right, it still might not be enough.

The emotional toll of constant crisis

Behind the dashboards and frameworks lies a deeply human truth: the job is emotionally draining. CISOs carry invisible stress that compounds daily, comprising incident fatigue, regulatory anxiety, breach paranoia, and more. You don’t just protect data but also trust. And trust is a fragile thing.

Every time a new zero-day surfaces or a supply-chain vendor gets compromised, there’s that gut-drop moment: Are we exposed? Every Slack notification at 2 a.m. carries that unwanted pulse of adrenaline. We often think about operational resilience, but emotional resilience is just as crucial.

The problem is that we love talking about “cyber resilience” in the enterprise yet rarely talk about resilience in leadership. About the toll it takes to live in perpetual readiness mode. About the sleepless nights spent replaying scenarios that, if they ever happened, would define your career in a single moment.

The legal and ethical shift

What’s making the role even heavier is the new legal landscape. Recent regulatory and judicial actions have made CISOs personally accountable in ways we’ve never seen before. What used to be an organizational liability is becoming an individual one.

The implication is chilling: on top of being responsible for defending the enterprise, you now also have to defend yourself. Every decision, every email, every risk acceptance form starts looking like potential evidence. This creates a tension between doing what’s best for the company and what’s safest for you personally. And that’s not just unsustainable – it’s downright corrosive.

The path forward

And yet, despite all of this, the CISO role remains one of the most critical and meaningful in modern business. Because amid the chaos, CISOs are the conscience of the digital enterprise. They are the ones reminding the organization that trust is currency, that integrity matters, and that resilience can’t be built in a quarter but needs to be deeply rooted in culture.

To make the role sustainable, something fundamental needs to shift. Boards and CEOs must stop treating cybersecurity as a siloed responsibility and start viewing it as a shared business risk. That means giving CISOs real authority, not just accountability. It means integrating security metrics into business performance, not burying them in risk reports.

We also need to normalize support for CISO mental health, be it through coaching, peer networks, or even sabbaticals. Because you can’t defend the whole organization effectively if you’re constantly in defense mode yourself.

Technology can help, too, but not in the way most people think. Automation, AI, and advanced testing tools such as modern DAST solutions can take some of the operational weight off security teams. They help simulate attacker behavior, validate vulnerabilities, and give CISOs something precious: clarity. When you know what’s real and what’s noise, you can lead with confidence instead of exhaustion.

But even with the best tools and talent, sustainable security is always about doing what really matters today, not about doing everything. The CISO of the future must master the arts of prioritization, communication, and balance. Picking your fights wisely is a survival trait, not a weakness.

The reality check

So, to answer the title question: Is the CISO role becoming unsustainable? In its current form – yes, but not irreparably so. I’d say it’s evolving, and evolution is never easy.

The next generation of CISOs will be different: more empowered, more supported, more business-aligned. But for that to happen, organizations must stop romanticizing the idea of the superhero CISO who never sleeps and start building the systems, cultures, and governance models that make sustainable security leadership possible.

Until then, we’ll keep walking this tightrope between resilience and burnout, accountability and impossibility. And maybe that’s the paradox of modern cybersecurity leadership: the role may be unsustainable, but the mission isn’t.

Because no matter how heavy it gets, someone still has to stand guard at the edge of digital trust and remind the world why it matters.