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CybersecurityHQ issues and preserves dated, bounded external cyber judgment.
Not news reaction. Not advisory opinion. Not consensus analysis.
Early mainframe access controls often operated on a concurrent model, where authority grant, logging, and revocation occurred within the same system boundary and operational window. The audit record and the control action shared a timeline. When distributed architectures separated execution from oversight across layers, vendors, and time zones, the audit record began arriving after the control action it was meant to document. That lag was originally treated as a latency problem. It has since become the operating architecture.
What changed is not that organizations stopped governing. What changed is that the evidentiary surface of governance detached from the operational surface of authority. Logs, attestations, and review cycles now describe a system's behavior to an audience that was not present when the behavior occurred. The record is structurally retrospective. This is not a degradation from a prior standard. For most organizations, no prior standard of contemporaneous accountability existed at current scale. The model was built this way.
The distinction reframes what is often described as an "accountability gap." The term implies something was lost. In most enterprise architectures, contemporaneous authority verification was never implemented. The gap is not between what existed and what remains. It is between what the evidentiary record claims and what the operational architecture can demonstrate.